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Artists
Enslaved as well as free African Americans pursued opportunities to create poetry, paintings, sculpture, and other forms of self-expression. Many, of course, had to create their opportunities to create. (Perhaps southern archives hold drawings created by slaves in the private papers of antebellum slaveowners, there to be discovered by researchers.) Presented here are works of three enslaved and four free African Americans. View each work as itself first; then consider its meaning to its creator and its time; then analyze its place as African American art in antebellum America. This may be difficult to do in the context of a Toolbox on antebellum African Americans, but respecting these artists' work requires it.
- Joshua Johnson was a free black (it is not certain whether he was ever enslaved) who painted oil portraits of the Baltimore white elite for over thirty years. The Westwood Children (ca. 1807) depicts the three sons of a stagecoach manufacturer in Baltimore.
- Robert Scott Duncanson was a free-born painter born of an African American mother and white father in New York. His painting career flourished in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the Freedmen's Bureau of Ohio underwrote a European study trip for Duncanson in 1853. Here we view three of Duncanson's landscapes—Mayan Ruins, Yucatan (1848), Uncle Tom and Eva (1853, a year after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin), and Minneopa Falls, Minnesota (1862; note the Native American by the waterfall).
- Edmonia Lewis was a free-born sculptor, also born in New York state, and also of mixed parentage: her father was a free black man and her mother a Chippewa Indian. Her earliest works were produced during the Civil War, including a medallion of John Brown and a bust of Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the white commander of a black Union infantry regiment during the war. (See postbellum Edmonia Lewis sculptures in Vol. II of this Toolbox).
- The son of a former slave, Augustus Washington learned how to produce daguerreotype photographs while at Dartmouth College and later opened a studio in Hartford, Connecticut. Here we view fourteen portrait photographs of the wealthy white families of Hartford, in addition to one portrait of John Brown, the leader of the Harper's Ferry rebellion. (See the Washington daguerreotypes of African Americans in Liberia in Theme V: EMANCIPATION, #4, Liberia.)
View, read (and attempt to solve) the works of these five free and three enslaved African Americans. How do these works contribute to the perennial philosophical question of the relation of art and identity to the creators and viewers of artistic work. (xx pages.)
Discussion questions
- How do these African Americans define themselves as artists, in their terms in their time?
- To what extent does their artistic activity define their sense of themselves?
- From what you can infer, how did white people respond to the artistic creations of these African Americans?
- Compare and contrast these artists by status (slave, freed slave, free-born), geographic region, gender, type of business, personal attributes, their business relationships with white people and other black people, and the spur that led to their artistic endeavors (as far as you know). What patterns do you find?
- Compare these artists with the entrepreneurs of the previous section (#3). What differences and similarities do you find?
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Framing Questions
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How did African Americans construct identity in antebellum America? |
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How did enslaved and free blacks differ in their exercise of power and self-determination?
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How did African Americans define themselves as members of groups?
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Printing
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Supplemental Sites
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| *PDF file - You will need software on your computer that allows you to read and print Portable Document Format (PDF) files, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not have this software, you may download it FREE from Adobe's Web site. |
Images:
- Joshua Johnson, portraits of Sea Captain John Murphy, and wife Barbara Baker Murphy, ca. 1810. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Permission pending.
- Edmonia Lewis, studio portrait (photograph) by H. Rocher, 1870s. Reproduced by permission of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
- Edmonia Lewis, bust of Col. Robert G. Shaw,
- Augustus Washington, daguerreotype photograph of Charles Edwin Bulkeley, circa 1852, in folding display case. Connecticut Historical Society. Permission pending. Digital image from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. Permission pending.
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