Painting

By: Anthony Aiello, William Pencak

Source:

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

Painting

The history of early African American painting is scattered and incomplete. In fact, evidence of the existence of black painters before the late nineteenth century comes not from paintings still in existence but from newspaper advertisements selling their services. The economic and social difficulties for free black fine artists and painters were severe, and the opportunities for slaves to engage in such pursuits were virtually nonexistent. Additionally, as with early American art in general, African American art consisted, for the most part, of folk art produced by anonymous people for practical use. Very little work dating to before the nineteenth century survives.

The earliest known African American artifact is a drum that was found in 1645 in colonial Virginia. Resembling a West African chief's drum, its decorative wood carving shows the high regard in which African and African American society held skilled carvers. The earliest African American sculpture and quilt date from the late eighteenth century. A wrought-iron figure found in Alexandria, Virginia, resembles West African statues used for ritual purposes in Mali. The quilt, from Hanover County, Virginia, is distinctively made of bits of fabric rather than imported textiles and has an ingenious pattern of stars and geometric shapes. Blacks made earthenware pots known as colonoware, which were frequently engraved with Central African symbols. African American traditions also survive in modern patterns on quilts and pottery, and women in Lowcountry South Carolina continue to fashion the beautiful and unique baskets they have made for nearly three centuries. The most distinctive early African American art comes from Lowcountry South Carolina, where blacks have numbered well over half the population from the early 1700s on. Without much white supervision—the planting of rice, the main crop, was an African practice—slaves were able to retain African symbols and rituals in their daily lives to a greater degree than elsewhere.

Skilled African American fine artists did not begin to appear until the late colonial period. Scipio Moorhead, a poet and painter, was an African slave from Boston who was owned by the Reverend John Moorhead. Scipio learned his craft from Moorhead's wife, Sarah, an art instructor and painter. By the time Phillis Wheatley, the first African American to publish a book of poems, commissioned Moorhead to execute the portrait of her that appeared on the frontispiece of her book, he was already famed in Boston as a young and skilled portraitist. His ink drawing of Wheatley sitting at a writing table with a contemplative upward gaze, a quill pen poised over a sheet of paper, an open book and inkwell on the desk, brought praise from Wheatley, who included in her collection a poem extolling his art (“To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works”). In her appraisal of the “wond'rous youth,” she agreed with the Boston Gazette, which on 7 January 1773 termed him an “extraordinary genius”:

" To show the lab'ring bosom's deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint,
When first thy pencil did those beauties give,
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,
How did those prespects [sic] give my soul delight,
A new creation rushing on my sight?
Still, wond'rous youth! each noble path pursue,
On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:
Still may the painter's and the poet's fire
To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire!
And may the charms of each seraphic theme
Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!
"

(Wheatley, p. 114) Wheatley names three of his paintings in the poem (Salem, Aurora, and Damon and Pythias), but little else is known of Moorhead's art or life.

The best-known African American artist of the early republic was Joshua Johnson (c. 1765–1830; also known as Johnston), who lived in Baltimore and was renowned for his fine portraits of whites and blacks, especially children. Born a slave, he had been freed by 1796 (other sources give the year 1798), when he advertised his services in the Baltimore Intelligencer as a “self-taught genius, deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of Art; and having experienced many insufferable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies.” His style is closely associated with the self-taught naive art of limners, who created portraits in a flat style with figures in stilted poses. His work is also associated with that of Charles Willson Peale, who painted in a similar style and even depicted some of the same subjects as Johnson did, presenting the possibility that Johnson was owned by Peale's family (perhaps purchased by Peale from his brother-in-law, Captain Robert Polk). However, it is virtually impossible to know exact details of Johnson's early life, owing to the scarcity of documentation, so such a direct connection between the two artists has not been proved. Johnson lived and worked entirely in Baltimore.

Although many artists of the time were itinerants, active slave traders and fugitive slave patrols made it dangerous for black artists to travel for work. Johnson probably did not keep a studio but instead worked from his sitters' homes. He is listed as a portrait painter or limner at several different locations throughout Baltimore between the appearance of his ad in the Intelligencer and his last citation in the Baltimore City Directory (after which he disappears from the historical record). It is not known when or where he died. More than eighty of his signed works survive.

Johnson's subjects were mostly white. His early portraits are generally of upper-class subjects, while his later paintings are largely of middle-class and working-class people. He is known to have painted only two black subjects, identified (though not definitively) as Daniel and Abner Coker, both of whom were prominent clerics in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Among the portraits of white subjects, many are of children, usually standing, posed gazing at the viewer, and holding a decorative device, such as a butterfly, flowers, books, or fruit. His painting of Emma Van Name shows her holding a strawberry. In his painting of the Westwood children, the two younger ones grasp individual flowers while the oldest child holds a basket of flowers; Johnson even includes a small dog with a pheasant in his jaws. Although the figures in his art are often flat, he brings depth to the paintings by overlapping figures and by placing his subjects in geometric spaces that provide a sense of space (in a room with areas that recede spatially or before windows through which landscape views are visible, for example). His work remains important both in terms of his role as the earliest documented black artist and within the tradition of early American art.

“Portrait of John Murphy, Sea Captain” by Joshua Johnson, oil on canvas, c. 1810. Johnson, who lived in Baltimore, was renowned for his fine portraits of whites and blacks.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, N.Y.

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Black artists also produced important prints. The almanac maker Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), who helped survey the city limits of the District of Columbia, proudly displayed himself as a black man on the cover of his 1790s almanacs. Robert Douglass Jr. (1809–1894), from a prominent Philadelphia black family, executed the first known lithograph by an African American, a portrait of William Lloyd Garrison. He also did the cover portrait of Francis Johnson on a collection of sheet music by the famous African American bandmaster from Philadelphia.

By their own artistic achievements, black artists, most of whom were self-taught, were able to display their talents alongside those of other members of their race, many of whom were concerned with the ways in which black people were depicted in the dominant white culture. Prominent African Americans, such as the Coker brothers of Baltimore, the black clergymen Richard Allen and Absalom Jones (painted by Raphaelle Peale, the son of Charles Willson Peale), the businessman James Forten, and the author Olaudah Equiano had their portraits painted wearing their best clothes and appearing as dignified, intelligent people to contradict the stereotypical images of blacks found on the white stage and in the media.

Artistic images of African Americans by whites tended to stress their subservient position. Masters might include favored slaves in their personal or family portraits, as did the Marquis de Lafayette. In popular literature, such as newspapers and broadsides, enslaved blacks were usually depicted either as happily working, frequently under white supervision or, if free, as lazy or ostentatiously dressed, with exaggerated features. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, American abolitionists borrowed and circulated two well-known images from their British coworkers: the infamous slave ship with people packed into every possible space and a kneeling, chained slave who reaches out to the viewer proclaiming, “Am I not a human and a brother?” Abolitionist literature generally portrayed blacks as noble beings suffering under cruel and unattractive masters. As Angelina Grimké wrote in her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836), “Until the pictures of the slave's sufferings were drawn and held up to public gaze, no Northerner had any idea of the cruelty of the system. … Prints are powerful appeals.”

Painters and Fine Artists to 1895

Black painters and fine artists of the antebellum, Civil War, and postwar periods found much greater access to patronage and an audience for a variety of reasons, but the long struggle for and slow attainment of liberty and civil rights were foremost among them. The ending of the slave trade and then of slavery itself, the constant and steady growth during the nineteenth century of free black communities throughout the North and South, and racial uplift and growing wealth among African Americans all contributed to the ability of black men and women to pursue a living in the fine arts. Of course, such pursuit still required the access to upper and middle class sponsorship and patronage (mostly from whites until just before the Civil War, when black abolitionists and community leaders became increasingly active as arts patrons) that the great majority of blacks did not have, but where and whenever possible, African Americans utilized their social connections, education and training, and skill to become painters and fine artists. Such men and women honed their skills in painting and the arts much the same way whites did: they trained professionally in studios and academies; they left the United States for the Grand Tour of London, Paris, and Rome; they exhibited their art locally and regionally, in the United States and abroad; they courted patrons, sought an audience, and worked for critical acceptance.

The movement for African American rights greatly affected the two most important black artists of the Civil War era: Robert Scott Duncanson (1821–1872) and Edmonia Wildfire Lewis (fl. 1840s–1900s). Duncanson first exhibited in 1842 in the Cincinnati area, where he moved with his African American mother (his father was Scottish Canadian) from his birthplace in Fayette, New York. In 1853 the Freeman's Aid Society of Ohio recognized his talents and sent him to Glasgow, Scotland, to study. Upon his return, he began painting portraits of prominent abolitionists such as James G. Birney, the first Liberty Party candidate for president, and Senator Lewis Cass of Maine. But he won his greatest renown for his splendid landscapes in the Ohio River Valley style as part of a group of artists influenced by the art of Thomas Cole specifically and the Hudson River School painters generally. Duncanson traveled frequently, exhibiting his paintings not only in the United States, but in Canada, England, Scotland, and Italy. In fact, he was the first internationally renowned black artist.

We do not know when or where the first known African American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis, was born, though it is likely to have been in the area of Albany, New York. Her father was black and her mother was probably of African American and Mississagua (Chippewa Indian) descent; their names are not known. The Mississaugua raised her after she was orphaned. Admitted to the Oberlin College Young Ladies Preparatory Department in 1859, she was falsely accused of poisoning two white students and beaten by a mob. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison arranged for her to move to Boston, where she studied with the sculptor Edward Brackett before continuing her studies in Rome, where she lived the rest of her life, returning to the United States several times to exhibit and sell her work. Her leading pieces included sculptures that celebrated her Indian heritage, busts of biblical heroines, and African American themes and figures. Among the works dedicated to African American themes are the well-known Freed Woman and Her Child (1866), the first treatment of this subject by a black sculptor; Forever Free (1867), which shows a black man and woman throwing off the chains of slavery and which took its name from the Emancipation Proclamation; and a bust of Robert Gould Shaw, the white colonel of the black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Civil War. Her most famous work, Death of Cleopatra (1876), survived stints as a decoration for a Chicago bar, a gravestone for a racehorse, and exile to a storage facility before it was rediscovered in 1985 and permanently housed at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. As with many of her works, it shows a proud, powerful woman—though this woman is realistically represented in the throes of death, not as the idealized dying queen most typically depicted by nineteenth-century artists.

Like Duncanson and Lewis, Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), the leading African American artist of the late nineteenth century, received training in Europe, in this case France. Like Lewis, he remained in Europe, living in France after the mid-1890s. The second African American to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Robert Douglass was the first), Tanner studied with Thomas Hovenden, who became his mentor, and Thomas Eakins, before exhibiting in Atlanta and Cincinnati. Early in his career Tanner put his art in the service of African Americans by painting several works, notably The Banjo Lesson (1893), The Thankful Poor (1894), and The Young Sabot Maker (1895), in which blacks appeared as dignified human beings rather than the minstrel types presented on stage and in print. These paintings were characterized by elements that would stay with Tanner throughout his career: the rendering of space through overlapping images and shapes; the use of diagonals to direct the eye; the lighting of subjects from various and internal sources; and a distinctive use of colors, deep blues and blue-greens, rich browns and mauves, accented with bright reds. But despite the encouragement of Booker T. Washington and others, Tanner moved away from African American themes and subjects, preferring to paint religious works in France where he suffered little prejudice and could earn more money while expressing his devout Christianity. Among his most famous religious works are Resurrection of Lazarus (1896) at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris; Nicodemus Visiting Jesus (1899) at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; and Mary (1900) at the LaSalle University Art Museum. Sodom and Gomorrah, his one piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, was lost.

The disappearance of major works by Lewis and Tanner reflects the lack of concern white America had for the work of black artists, but at least their names are known and most masterpieces survive. We only remember David Bustill Bowser because he painted the superb battle flags used by African American soldiers in the Civil War. His flags were lost, thrown out of a storage compartment of West Point's military museum in the 1940s. Photographs of seven still exist; they reveal a tremendous power and race consciousness. The 127th and 3rd regiments marched carrying banners reading “We will prove ourselves men,” and “Rather Die Freemen, Than Live to Be Slaves.” Beneath these banners, black soldiers protect white women representing Columbia, the symbol of the republic. The 45th Regiment's banner, proclaiming “One Cause, One Country,” shows a black soldier proudly holding an American flag in front of a bust of George Washington as black troops fight in the background. The 24th Regiment's banner shows a black soldier ascending a hill, his arms outstretched in prayer, beneath the words “Let Soldiers in War, Be Citizens in Peace.” Most interesting is the 22nd Regiment's banner. It reads “Sic simper tyrannis” (thus always—that is, death—to tyrants), which is also the state of Virginia's motto. But here the tyrant is a white Confederate who has tossed aside his weapons and flag and has surrendered to the mercy of a black Union soldier who points a bayonet at him.

Bowser was a sign-painter in Philadelphia who had also studied with Robert Douglass, his cousin. But for the battle flags, his work and name would be unknown, as are those of the vast majority of African American fine artists, musicians, and writers of the nineteenth century, whose works were either lost or produced anonymously. Not surprisingly, few African American artists became known within their own country, let alone internationally. The only black artists with international reputations were Robert Duncanson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and to a lesser extent Edmonia Lewis. However, though Lewis gained widespread recognition, her boundary-breaking art and lifestyle and her nonconformist approach to the same, caused her to struggle throughout her life. She died forgotten, her place and date of death unknown. By the end of the nineteenth century a new black consciousness was developing that called for what Alain Locke would describe in a highly critical assessment of Tanner:

"We ought to and must have a school of Negro art, a local and racially representative tradition. And that we have not, explains why the generation of Negro artists succeeding Mr. Tanner had only the inspiration of his greatness to fire their ambitions, but not the guidance of a distinctive tradition to focus and direct their talents."

(p. 266) The succeeding generation would reject the themes and subjects of artists like Tanner and Duncanson. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, African American artists began focusing on class, depicting urban cityscapes and culture, and painting African and African American figures; by doing so, they helped forge a new black identity.

See also Abolitionism; African Methodist Episcopal Church; Allen, Richard; Artisans; Arts and Crafts; Banneker, Benjamin; Class; Coker, Daniel T.; Equiano, Olaudah; Forten, James; Johnson, Francis; Jones, Absalom; Lafayette, Marquis de, and African Americans; Literature; Stereotypes of African Americans; Visual Arts; and Wheatley, Phillis.

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