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Duncanson, Robert Stewart

3 articles on Duncanson, Robert Stewart

• Duncanson, Robert S.

  Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

  Word Count: 1789      Includes:  Bibliography

  1821?–1872
  African American artist. Robert S. Duncanson was born in Fayette, New York, the son of John Dean Duncanson, a carpenter and handyman, and Lucy Nickles. His grandfather Charles Duncanson was a former slave from Virginia who was emancipated and around 1790moved north. Perhaps because he was the illegitimate offspring of his master, Charles had been permitted to learn a skilled trade and later to earn his release from bondage. After the death of Charles, the Duncanson family moved west to the boomtown of Monroe, Michigan, on the tip of Lake Erie. There Robert Duncanson, along with his four brothers, was raised in the family trades of housepainting, decorating, and carpentry, a legacy of his grandfather's bondage. At the age of seventeen, after several years of apprenticeship, Duncanson entered into the painting trade with a partner, ...
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• Duncanson, Robert S.

  Source: African American National Biography

  Word Count: 1704      Includes:  Further Reading | Obituary:

  (1821?–21 Dec. 1872), painter, was born in Fayette, New York, the son of John Dean Duncanson, a carpenter and handyman, and Lucy Nickles. Robert's grandfather Charles Duncanson was a former slave from Virginia who was emancipated and around 1790moved north. Perhaps because he was the illegitimate offspring of his master, Charles had been permitted to learn a skilled trade and later to earn his release from bondage. After the death of Charles, the Duncanson family moved west to the boomtown of Monroe, Michigan, on the tip of Lake Erie. There Robert, along with his four brothers, was raised in the family trades of house painting, decorating, and carpentry, a legacy of his grandfather's bondage. At the age of seventeen, after several years of apprenticeship, Robert entered into the painting trade with a partner, ...
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• Duncanson, Robert S.

  Source: Grove Art Online

  Word Count: 892      Includes:  Bibliography

  (b. Fayette, Seneca County, NY, ?1821; d. Detroit, MI, 21 Dec 1872).

  American painter. A self-taught mulatto artist and a landscape painter of the Hudson River school tradition, Duncanson was the first Afro-American artist to receive international recognition. Born into a family of painters and handymen, Duncanson first worked as a house-painter and glazier in Monroe, MI. By 1841 he was in Cincinnati, OH, where he learnt to paint by executing portraits and copying prints. Throughout the 1840s he travelled as an itinerant artist between Cincinnati, Monroe and Detroit. His early work was crude and primitive, betraying his lack of training.

  Around 1850 Duncanson was awarded his largest commission, the landscape murals for the Cincinnati estate Belmont, formerly the Martin Baum House (now Cincinnati, OH, Taft Mus.).

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