In this painting, enslaved people are harvesting sugar cane and carting it to the boiling room. The bucolic scene belies the extraordinary brutality of slavery. Not only were enslaved people beaten, raped, and tortured, the island’s economy was so geared to sugar that malnutrition and even starvation haunted plantation society. Note, as well, the tall chimneys, nearly identical to what one could see in industrial cities in England. Indeed, the plantation offered a model for the modern factory. Denbigh plantation, which for a time employed a steam engine, was owned by the Pennants, a pioneering Welsh industrial family.