Arts and Crafts

By: Rebekah Presson Mosby

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Arts and Crafts

The colonial period in America was not noted for its fine arts; there was little in the way of sculpture, and most of the paintings that were made were stiff portraits in the manner of European, mostly British, art. The puritanical spirit that dominated America at the time was not one that nurtured the arts in general. Very little, if any, experimentation went on in any of the arts, as most art was regarded as frivolous and a distraction from what was held to be the serious and important business of religion and work. Within this context there is evidence that fine art in the form of portraits was made by Africans in colonial America. However, most of the known artifacts from both slave and free blacks are the work of artisans. Some of this work is of exceptionally high quality, and it includes just about every imaginable practical and decorative artwork—from the ornate iron railings adorning the balconies of New Orleans to fine clothing, silverware, pottery, and woodcarvings. The area in which black Americans were probably most accomplished was furniture making.

While it is unlikely that the early slaveholders bought slaves with the notion of employing them as artisans, it is clear that the talents of the Africans were quickly identified. Not long after the appearance of the first slaves on American shores, blacks were employed as cobblers, tailors, silversmiths, and carpenters, among other creative professions. There were, of course, economic reasons for training blacks in such skills. Artisans who arrived from Europe often either renounced their crafts to make more money as land and slave owners or charged very high prices for their crafts. Some white artisans, of course, trained slaves to do the work in order to make more products and thus more money. Even the paid work of free blacks was a desirable commodity, because it was much cheaper than that of whites.

It is clear that people of African descent distinguished themselves in nearly all art forms—from music to the making of every imaginable type of art and craft—from their first appearance in America. The record regarding early contributions by blacks in the fine arts, such as painting and sculpture, is less well documented. In part, this was because making fine art was often a secret activity for blacks.

Artisanry was one thing; after all, everyone needed tables and chairs, dressers and staircases, and it could be overlooked if they were a bit more beautiful or ornate than was absolutely necessary. The puritanical spirit could accept that working with wood and other materials was “real” work, not an obvious statement of self-expression such as that made by a painter, a sculptor, or a poet. And while whites had always allowed themselves to be entertained by the accomplished musicians in the African American population, giving a black person a canvas and a brush or a piece of marble to sculpt was another matter, a matter generally looked down upon for much the same reasons that reading was forbidden to slaves. Making visual artwork in colonial times was kept secret because of the danger involved if whites saw the work. Unfortunately, very little remains of the earliest works, as most were condemned as products of pagans or heretics and destroyed if discovered. Even beyond this kind of risk, black—and particularly slave—visual artists were hampered by the difficulty blacks faced in obtaining materials.

Artisans

The few remaining early artworks made by Africans in America are, as might be expected, based on recollections of life in Africa. Drums akin to African drums date from as early as about 1645. Other seventeenth-century artifacts include iron statues. The statues, as well as eighteenth-century works, such as walking canes and baskets, resemble similar pieces found in Africa. A wrought-iron figure of a man, made by a Virginia slave, looks very much like wooden sculptures from the Sudan. The sculpture was found buried in the slave quarters of a Richmond blacksmith shop, indicating that the artist did not dare make this work in the open. The fact that it survived can almost certainly be attributed to the durability of iron. An early-nineteenth-century pair of carved wood chickens (a rooster and a hen) is reminiscent of a bronze rooster sculpture from Benin. These pieces are attributed to a slave of the pirate Jean Lafitte, who perhaps appreciated their beauty. Even in later works, such as carved mantelpieces, touches of African influence show up in the form of a mask worked into the pattern or possibly an abstract design that can be traced to West Africa.

In the area of ceramics, a group of so-called grotesque jugs have faces with oversized features that resemble those found on some African masks. By the early 1800s “Dave the Potter,” a slave who had been taught to write, was signing and dating his pots, which are noted for their height and wide, ridged mouths. Dave the Potter is unusual in that his name is known. The vast majority of African American artisans were unknown, both because it was not the practice to sign most art and artisan work in colonial times and because, with some exceptions, blacks were generally not given credit for their work, no matter how accomplished. And while the work of colonial blacks was often excellent, early African Americans did not change the realm of the visual arts in the same way that they did music, for example. It was possible to make innovations in music using just the voice or a simple instrument, but when it came to making things from expensive materials such as mahogany or silver, blacks were rarely allowed to deviate from the European norm.

Silver footed cup by Peter Bentzon, the first black silversmith in the United States to mark his works with his name. Bentzon was born free c. 1783 in Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands; was apprenticed in Philadelphia; and was active mainly from 1817 to 1849. This cup—about 7 inches high and 4 inches in diameter—dates from 1841.

Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with the Thomas Skelton Harrison Fund and with the partial gift of Wynard Wilkinson, 1994.

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Armoire by Celestin Glapion, c. 1790. Glapion was a free man of color and furniture-maker in colonial New Orleans.

Collection of Louisiana State Museum.

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All the same, blacks were entrusted with these materials and some slaves were sold as artisans, including silversmiths, even before the Revolutionary War. Blacks were so much a part of the colonial crafts world that some whites felt the need to hold them back. As early as 1755 the Provincial Legislature of South Carolina was petitioned to pass a law restraining blacks from entering trades where they already outnumbered whites. (The proposed law would also have banned blacks from being left in charge of shops, from which one can conclude that many blacks, free and slave, were indeed entrusted with keeping shops.) Although very few works of any sort were signed, many black artisans followed local tradition and advertised their work widely, often including the information that the craftsman was a person of color.

As might be expected, some of the more enduring works by black artisans include furniture. Among the best-known black colonial furniture makers was Thomas Day, whose work was highly sought after in the early to middle 1800s. Day used many types of wood and was known for his graceful carvings on furniture and staircases. His work is often viewed as a synthesis between European and African design. One of his pieces often pointed to in this regard is a stair newel post in the Paschal House in Caswell County, North Carolina; the carving can easily be seen as an African statuette. Day was educated in Boston and Washington, D.C., and worked in North Carolina as a free black. By 1820 his work was widely advertised and well regarded. He became very wealthy, so wealthy that he owned slaves who helped run his business.

In Petersburg, Virginia, the freed-black craftsmen John Raymond and John Ventus paid taxes on their cabinetmaking business and advertised it. Many slaves were also makers of fine furniture. John Hemings, the brother of Thomas Jefferson's companion Sally Hemings, made some of the most elegant woodwork and furniture at Jefferson's house, Monticello, in Virginia.

Slaves were also involved in the making of both textiles and fine clothes. Plantation owners began growing cotton and flax, as well as producing wool, in the 1770s, partly to clothe their slaves. The slaves were put in charge of weaving the cloth and making their own clothes. Many black women were also responsible for making elegant clothing to be worn by both white and black women, including another of Sally Hemings's siblings, Nance Hemings, who was a weaver trained on the Jefferson estate during the Revolutionary War. While the names of most black seamstresses are lost, some of their work is of the highest quality, the equivalent of couture.

Artists

There appear to have been few African Americans who made fine art in colonial America, but among those who did was the slave Scipio Moorhead, who created the engraving that served as frontispiece to Phillis Wheatley's 1773 book Poems on Various Subjects. It seems that Moorhead was a painter as well as an engraver; a hand-written note from Wheatley refers to him as “a young African painter.” Wheatley herself, it should be noted, was repeatedly called on to prove that she, a black woman, could really produce the quality of work found in her book—a question that no doubt followed all African American artists of the colonial period.

Many observers have come to believe that the gifted Baltimore portrait artist Joshua Johnston, who was active in the late 1700s and early 1800s, was almost certainly black, but although Johnston's identity has been widely researched, there is no conclusive proof of his race. The idea that he might have been black started with various family stories, possibly family myths, about a free black man who painted portraits and with a will written by a Baltimore widow that named the artist of a portrait of her as “J Johnson.” (As was the norm for the time, none of Johnston's portraits was signed.) A Joshua Johnston appears in the 1817 Baltimore directory as a “Free Householder of Colour.” Johnston (or Johnson—there seems to be no continuity in the spelling) solicited customers for his portrait business. However, his advertisements do not mention the artist's race.

Other artists advertised their skills as portrait painters and named themselves as Negroes. A portrait painter who predated Johnston by a quarter century placed a wholly immodest advertisement in the Massachusetts Gazette in 1773, referring to himself as “a Negro Man whose extraordinary Genius has been assisted by one of the best Masters in London; he takes Faces at the lowest Rates [sic].” In Johnston's 1798 advertisement in the Baltimore Intelligencer, he also claims to be a genius, “a self-taught genius,” and he refers to “many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies.” These “insuperable obstacles” are often interpreted as a not-too-veiled reference to the painter's race.

Those who are skeptical that Johnston was black, including the artist and scholar Romare Bearden, think it unlikely that an African American of such achievement would have gone unnoted in Baltimore. At the time, the city contained a large and active abolitionist community that touted the achievements of notable blacks, such as Johnston's contemporary, the mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker. However, most of Johnston's subjects were slave owners, and it might have been bad for business if he were to involve himself in the abolitionist movement. One more contradiction: some portraits of black leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church are believed to be in the style of Johnston and thus may point to his being black.

Middle and Late Nineteenth-Century Artists

By the Civil War, African Americans had more fully entered the world of fine art, and before the end of the nineteenth century, the painters Robert S. Duncanson, Edward M. Bannister, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, and the sculptor Edmonia Lewis had gained national and international reputations. Each of these artists achieved recognition in an environment still hostile to the possibility that African American artists could excel. The feelings of many, possibly most, white Americans were summarized by an 1867 New York Herald article that declared, “the Negro seems to have an appreciation for art while being manifestly unable to produce it.” In addition to having to endure this general environment of hostility, these acclaimed artists shared at least two other characteristics; all were born free in non-slave states (or Canada), and all were affiliated in some way with white abolitionists who, in some cases, helped the artist further his or her career.

Joshua Johnson's “Portrait of a Gentleman,” who has been identified as the Reverend Daniel T. Coker. The portrait dates from c. 1805–1810.

American Museum in Britain.

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Robert Scott Duncanson was the first African American to gain widespread acclaim as a fine art painter. Duncanson became established in the 1850s while still a self-taught artist and was widely known for his exquisitely detailed still-lifes, one of which would later hang in the Detroit Institute of Art. Duncanson was born around 1817 in upstate New York to a black American mother and a Canadian father of Scottish descent. He was given an important commission around 1850 when Nicholas Longworth hired Duncanson to paint eight murals in the foyer of Longworth's Cincinnati mansion. Subsequent owners of the house covered the paintings with wallpaper, but they were later restored for what would become the Taft Museum.

Duncanson, like several other nineteenth-century black artists, made and sold portraits of abolitionist leaders. In fact the Anti-Slavery League paid to send him to Glasgow, Scotland, to receive formal training. Duncanson returned to America around 1854 and much of his later work was affiliated with the Hudson River School of landscape painting. The Hudson River School artists began work around 1825 and followed William Cullen Bryant's demand that American artists needed to celebrate the natural beauty of their own country and not merely imitate the art of Europe. Duncanson traveled widely and painted landscapes in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, England, Ohio, Canada, and Scotland, among other places.

It is widely believed that Duncanson was the first African American professional fine art painter; on 30 May 1861 the Cincinnati Gazette declared him “the best landscape painter in the west.” Despite his success, Duncanson felt compelled to leave the country because of racial tensions and so lived in Europe during the Civil War.

After returning to the United States, Duncanson once again flourished, especially in the Detroit and Cincinnati areas. In addition to landscapes, Duncanson was interested in popular literature and illustrated various texts, including Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The first African American sculptor of wide repute was Edmonia Lewis, who was born around 1843 to an African American father and a mother of Ojibwa Indian descent. The details surrounding Lewis's life are sketchy, but it appears that she was born in either New Jersey or New York and that she was orphaned at an early age and raised largely by her mother's tribe. Lewis was born with the name Wildfire, which she changed to Edmonia when she was a student at Oberlin College in Ohio. Her studies are said to have been financed by her brother, a successful prospector in California.

Though Lewis was a talented and popular student at Oberlin, she appears to have been embroiled in a bizarre episode in 1862 in which she was accused of poisoning two housemates with a drug known for its aphrodisiac qualities. It seems that Lewis was tried and acquitted of the charges against her, but then brutally beaten by a local mob. She left Oberlin before graduating and went to Boston.

In Boston, Lewis made and sold portraits of heroic figures, including abolitionists, and she won the John Brown medallion for her bust of Robert Gould Shaw, who led an all-black battalion during the Civil War. The money from the sale of these works allowed Edmonia Lewis to go to Rome in 1865, at which time she received formal training as a sculptor.

While in Rome, Lewis became accomplished as a sculptor in marble. Among the works she completed in the 1860s and 1870s were statues of Biblical figures such as Moses and Hagar and a bust of the Roman emperor Octavian. Lewis is best known, however, for her 1876 sculpture “The Death of Cleopatra,” which stands more than five feet tall and was exhibited in Boston, Chicago, Rome, and San Francisco and received much critical acclaim.

Lewis worked in the naturalistic style that was popular in her time. Her Cleopatra, which depicts the Egyptian queen after being bitten by the asp that supposedly killed her, is a pastiche of styles and incorporates details from Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art. The hieroglyphic symbols on the sculpture are nonsense. The Cleopatra sculpture took a circuitous route to its eventual home at the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art. Lost for many years, it seems to have gone from place to place, including a bar, a graveyard (as a marker for a horse), and a storage yard.

Lewis made at least two works celebrating her ethnic heritage: “Old Arrow Maker” (1866–1872) depicts two Native Americans, and “Forever Free” (1867) two freed black slaves. Nonetheless by 1880 Lewis had expatriated and visited the United States only to show and sell her work. Lewis was last known to be living in Rome in 1911, and the time and place of her death remain unknown.

Edward Mitchell Bannister did not have the formal training that Duncanson and Lewis had, and yet he was the first African American to win a national prize for his art. The painting, later lost, was titled “Under the Oaks,” and it won the first place Bronze Medal at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. It is said that the contest judges, upon learning Bannister's ethnicity, wanted to reconsider their judgment. However, the white competitors stood by the initial decision.

Bannister was born in 1828 in Canada to a West Indian father and mother of unknown heritage. His parents died when the artist was very young, and Bannister was raised by a white Canadian family. Bannister moved to Boston in 1848, where he started to paint in the realist style but then was inspired by the Barbizon School of landscape painting. This school, which had its roots in the work of such French artists as Theodore Rousseau and Camille Corot, rejected academic tradition in an effort to create what the artists considered a truer representation of nature.

Bannister was a prolific artist, and the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art would later acquire some 120 of his works. Bannister worked largely in an impasto style, using thick layers of paint with few details. When human subjects are included in his work, they appear to be of white people. Also recognized as a knowledgeable critic of art, Bannister was among the founding members of the famed Rhode Island School of Design. He died in Rhode Island in 1901.

The ninteenth and twentieth centuries were spanned by Henry Ossawa Tanner, whom many critics consider to be the greatest African American painter to date. Tanner's reputation was international and his work widely exhibited in France as well as America. Tanner was the founder of “religious genre” painting, in which Biblical subjects are depicted as ordinary people. Although considered by many to be old fashioned by the time of his death in 1937, Tanner's work, as well as his reputation, opened the way for the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

See also Architecture; Artisans; Banneker, Benjamin; Clothing; Free African Americans to 1828; Hemings, Sally; Music; Painting and Sculpture; Visual Arts; and Wheatley, Phillis.

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