Little is known of the artist who created this extremely rare work. Published anonymously ‘by a Lady’, her identity has been deduced as Lydia Byam from another copy with the plates bearing the initials ‘LB’. Byam was a member of a powerful family based on Antigua and was descended from Edward Byam (c. 1664-1741), Governor of the Leeward Islands. The Byams owned several sugar plantations across the Caribbean and benefitted financially from the transatlantic slave trade. In 1821, Lydia Byam is recorded as owning one enslaved woman, named Jenny, and having inherited a further 18 people. In 1835, she is recorded as being compensated £1,706 on the abolition of enslavement in the British Empire.
According to surviving letters, it is clear that Byam completed her education in England but maintained a passion for Antigua and soon returned to the island. In 1786-7, it is probable that she met the merchant Henri de Ponthieu (1731-1808) who had travelled to the Caribbean to collect specimens for Sir Joseph Banks and was staying on the Codrington estates on neighbouring Barbuda.
Byam's Collection of Exotics from the Island of Antigua was one of several books she published on Caribbean plantlife. Dedicated to Elizabeth Monckton-Arundell, Viscountess Galway (d. 1801), the 12 plates were delicately coloured by hand. Byam’s descriptions of Caribbean plants bear similarities to and may have been influenced by those published by Maria Riddell (1772-1808) in her Voyages to Madeira and the Leeward Caribbean Isles (1792). Although Riddell did record a meeting with the Byam family during her stay in Antigua in the 1780s, it is not known if she met Lydia Byam, or if the pair corresponded over their botanical observations.