MS01.01.03 - Box 01 - Folder 25 - The Black Image in American Painting 1700-1900 A Select Survey, Circa 1980

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His study of [u] Negro Boy [/u] shows a sensitively painted black lad sitting in the door of a log cabin playing a reed flute. In 1862, two years after [u] Negro Boy [/u] was completed and Johnson did a painting called (SLIDE #37) [u] The Young Musicians [/u] in which a small black child and man are seen listening in the background to the music. (SLIDE #38) [u] A Ride for Freedom - Fugitive Slaves [/u] was completed in 1863 and is said by the artist to be a scene he witnessed at Centerville, Virginia on the morning of March 2, 1862 when McClelan's troops advanced on Manassas. 15 Johnson was interested in black life and is well known for his celebrated work (SLIDE #39) [u] Old Kentucky Home[/u]. (SLIDE #40) [u] Portrait of a Negress [/u] shows an old woman leaning forward so as to rest on her walking stick. The portrait was completed in 1866 as was (SLIDE #41) [u] Fiddling His Way [/u] which shows a black musician playing a fiddle in the home of common whites (SLIDE #42 [u] Negro Youth, 1863 [/u])

The talents of artists Emanuel Gottlieb Lentze, born in Germany, Ferdinand Reichardt from Denmark, Buscher of Switzerland and Thomas Hovenden, a native of Ireland, were joined with a host of Americans of the pre-Civil War era and late 19th century to produce images that mirrored the various ways in which Blacks were viewed by Whites in American life. [crossed out: Lentze, a painter of murals in the U.S. Capitol, was caught up in recounting historical themes (SLIDE # ) such as [u] Mrs. Schuyler is accompanied by a black servant who carries the lantern which supplies the fire. [/u])

[crossed out: Of equal importance is John Quidar, was a painter of solid imagination and one who filed his compositions with suspense and drama. Note the minstrel like characterizations given the frightened black subject in (SLIDE # ) [u] The Money Diggers. [/u]

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Ferdinand Reichart's painting entitled (SLIDE #43) [u]Philadelphia in 1858[/u] shows black subjects among the city street walkers. (SLIDE #44) [u]Guitar Player[/u], 1867 is the work of Frank Buscher. Horace Bonham (SLIDE #45) [u]Nearing the Issue at the Cockpit[/u] was painted in 1870. Several black faces are seen witnessing the sports event. (SLIDE #46) [u]A Pastoral Visit[/u] was painted by Richard Norris Brooke in 1881 and shows a scene in the home of a common black family. Thomas Hovenden's composition entitled (SLIDE #47) [u]Their Pride[/u] provides a contrasting study with Brooke's [u]Pastoral Visit[/u] of black homes of the period. [deleted: Thomas Pollock Anshutz (SLIDE #47) [u]Aunt Hannah[/u] again revives the stereotype of laziness, evading work and] S. Jennings (SLIDE #48) [u]Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences[/u] again revives the stereotype of the tired mammy in this [deleted: 1888] 1782 composition. [deleted: It] Here it is the headrag, [deleted: the broom and the nodding woman] and other symbols of servitude that provide us with the particular frame of reference for the stereotyped image.

The most acceptable as well as the most stereotypic image of Blacks being produced during the post Civil War period came from the hand of William Aiken Walker, a native of Charleston, South Carolina. Walker's first recorded painting was done in 1850 when he was 12 years old. Its subject was said to be a [u]Negro on the Docks of Charleston[/u]. By far the lesser craftsman among all 19th century artists whom I have cited, Walker, however, was the most prolific and produced more images with black subjects than any other white American artist of the period. He was trained as a photographer and often painted directly from his shots of black life and genre, thus the stiff, scarecrow type figues that stand motionless against the southern landscape so often seen in his work. Views of Blacks in cotton fields, (Walker series [deleted: 47-62] 48-56 -- Slides 1 through 16)

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hoeing cotton, warf scenes, Blacks travelling and goodtiming along the way, market scenes, harvesting crops and cabin scenes are among the many images [crossed out: he] Walker created in which the subjects were often anatomically ill proportioned and used in the same manner that one would use dolls or other lifeless props in a still life. [crossed out: (Note)]

His important, major contribution can be seen as a chronicle of Black life in the postwar South. This account of Walker's art reveals the sentimental feelings white writers showed when viewing his work: The New Orleans [u] Daily Picayune [/u], November 30, 1884, writes (P. 2) "Walker's drawings of the Negro in his native cotton and cane fields is immutably given with all of the half pathetic raggedness of costume and love of gay colors that renders the darky such good artistic material for one who has the skill."16

Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins provide us with a final glimpse of the image of the Black American as shown, in painting prior to the turn of the century. Homer found the black subject one to his liking and used it for historical documentation, first for magazines, then for general interpretation of the power of the black image in the making of formal composition. Most interesting is the contrast to be noted in the way Homer points Blacks in a cotton field [crossed out: (SLIDE # ) [u] Cotton Pickers [/u] and] (SLIDE #57) [u] Upland Cotton [/u] over and against Walker's version of the same subject. Homer gives a living quality to the working figures that does not occur in Walker's studies. [crossed out: But] Beyond this note of criticism, Homer used black images as principal subjects that included aspects of life other than the field experience, (SLIDE #58) [u] The Turtle Pound [/u]. But Homer also produced sketches with the pickaninny image of the (SLIDE #59) [u] Jolly Cook [/u] dancing wildly while white soldiers looked

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on amusingly. His sojourn to the Caribbean showed black subjects in control of the waters there just as he had done when painting the white seamen [crossed out: of] controlling the North Atlantic waters (SLIDE #60) [u] Shark Fishing [/u]. The furies of the storm and the unpredictable currents of the sea give title to this watercolor (SLIDE #61) called [crossed out: [u] After the Hurricane[/u]] Gulf Stream. The [crossed out: still] gleaming body of a black fisherman [crossed out: lies] is sprawled in a boat [crossed out: against, debris of a wrecked boat on] in a drifting boat near a Bahamian island [crossed out: (SLIDE # ) see also [u] Under the Coco Palm [/u]. His documentation of Black life is reminiscent of the depiction Walker gave but Homer's sophistication as an artist (SLIDE # [u] Sunday Morning in Virginia [/u]] raises our interest level to see sensitively the pity and deprivation associated with the newly freed slaves.

Thomas Eakins employed Blacks as models for portraits some of whom he painted as individuals of character (SLIDE #62) [u] Portrait of his Pupil - Henry O. Tanner [/u] (SLIDE # ) [crossed out: [u] The Red Shawl[/u], about 1890 and (SLIDE #63)] [u] The Negress[/u] 1869 (SLIDE # 64 ) [u] Whistling for Plover[/u] shows a black man waiting in the marshes to aim his gun at the ducks that are to answer his call. [u] Negro Boy Dancing [/u] (SLIDE #65) shows one of the few genre scenes executed by Eakins. (SLIDE #66) (SLIDE # ) A Study for [u] Negro Boy Dancing [/u] shows how observant the artist was to capture even the emotion on the mouth of the young dancer who bucks it out to the theme of the banjo.

Black American artists during the 19th century painted few images of other blacks. Robert S. Duncanson's (SLIDE #67) [u] Uncle Tom and Little Eva [/u] provides no relief from the stereotype impage often associated with black lifestyle and the unsympathetic literature of the period. Edward Mitchell Bannister's (SLIDE #68) [u] Newspaper Boy [/u] or [u] Mulatto Boy [/u] is an excellent example of a portrait

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by a black artist. But Henry O'Tanner's celebrated (SLIDE #69) [u] Banjo Lesson [/u], 1893 provides us with an important definition of the Black experience as seen by a black artist. (SLIDE #70) His [u] Thankful Poor [/u], and the [u] Banjo Lesson [/u] are two of the major compositions completed by the artist prior to his going to Europe to paint, after which he turned principally to the interpretation of religious themes that were void of black subjects.

Finally it may be of interest to note that John Singleton Sargent, Frederick Remington, Thomas Moran and George Inness were among the many American artists who depicted Blacks in their art during the later [latter] quarter of the nineteenth century. In each case the artist paid less attention to the racial features of the subject [crossed out: as though] in an attempt to blend human figures into the setting without particular note.

[crossed out: It is] Finally, it is of equal importance to note that the image of the Black in American art had not been undertaken as a subject around which an exhibition was worth of presentation prior to the summer of 1964. It was Marvin Sadik, [crossed out: now] Director of the National Portrait Gallery, who assembled the first such exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. It was called [u] The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting [/u]. The exhibition ran through July 15, 1964. And perhaps for the very first time, students of American art, other than Blacks themselves, took special note of the Black theme as it appeared from colonial time to the mid twentieth century. Saliently displayed were canvasses showing blatent [blatant] feelings of racial inferiority previously cited. And perhaps for the first time art historians realized the deliberate biases of some of