![\"An](\"http:\/\/opentextbooks.concordia.ca\/art366\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/54\/2023\/07\/Img9.126.jpg\")
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Thankful Poor,<\/cite> 1894. Oil on canvas.\u00a0\u00a090.1 cm x 112.4 cm. Private collection. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0CONTENTS<\/p>\r\n
Introduction<\/p>\r\n
9.1<\/p>\r\n
Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, Romanticism\r\nand the Radical Representation of Race<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.2<\/p>\r\n The Atlantic Slave Trade: Records and Reverberations<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.3<\/p>\r\n Abolition and Aesthetics in Britain: J.M.W. Turner's Slave Ship<\/em>\/a><\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.4<\/p>\r\n Picturing Enslavement:\r\nGenre, Race and Stereotype in Antebellum America<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.5<\/p>\r\n Civil War<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.6<\/p>\r\n Emancipation, Black Civil Rights and Social Reform<<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.7<\/p>\r\n Winslow Homer: Bearing Witness<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.8<\/p>\r\n Reconstruction and the Remaking of Identity<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.9<\/p>\r\n Tools for Freedom<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.10<\/p>\r\n Nature as Metaphor<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.11<\/p>\r\n Frederick Douglass\u2019s \"Pictures and Progress\":\r\nReclaiming Race<\/a><\/p>\r\n 9.12<\/p>\r\n Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner: Breaking Free<\/a><\/p>\r\n INTRODUCTION<\/p>\r\n An understanding of nineteenth-century modernity is incomplete without a consideration of the complex legacy of racialized slavery. Beyond its economic and political impact and the horrific human toll on millions of people of African descent, the history of Atlantic slavery advanced a Eurocentric worldview which asserted Western supremacy and legitimized the identity construction of the 'other.'<\/p>\r\n This chapter will look at how representations of race were conceived, received and confronted in the Western imagination. How did artists picture a negated humanity born of bondage? Beginning with the European Romanticist artists, Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault and J.M.W. Turner, and moving through to late-nineteenth American art, we will examine the underpinnings of conceptualizing race as momentous events were shaping modern history. In the context of race, these themes extend to narratives related to slavery, colonialism, and the struggles of marginalized communities.<\/p>\r\nWhen \u00c9douard Manet was painting his infamous Olympia<\/em> in 1863, and Paris was embracing modern life, modernity in the United States was mired in the changes of a nation's fractured identity. America's expansive agenda, its manifest destiny, was deeply entwined with slavery. The clash over slavery divided the country and led to the cataclysmic events of the Civil War in 1861, and the Reconstruction era, fraught with stereotypical slander, which followed.\r\n\r\nAmerican artists were severely challenged by the impact and aftermath of the war and the profound social changes they witnessed. Some turned to genre images of the every day, ambiguous and open-ended, to comment on the changing relationships between blacks and whites. Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson produced works that reflected America's complex, changing attitudes toward black citizens in psychologically nuanced works that considered the inner experience of African Americans.\u00a0 Others adopted the metaphorical potential of the natural world, presenting the transformations of a nation in flux through the pictorial investigation of landscape phenomena.\r\n\r\nThe contributions of nineteenth-century African American artists Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner will close the chapter. The obstacles of racial and gender bias compelled both artists to pursue their acclaimed professional careers internationally, Tanner living in Paris, while Lewis worked in Italy, where she produced the iconic sculpture Forever Free.<\/em>\r\n In the early nineteenth century, as the Napoleonic Empire collapsed, European allies comprising Britain, Prussia, Russia, Austria, and later France, convened the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) to reorganize \u00a0Europe and re-establish conservative order across the continent. France was returned to its original borders of 1789 but reclaimed the West African colony of Senegal from the British. The international abolition of the slave trade was also on the table in Vienna, initiated by British anti-slavery campaigners who feared that with peace, French slave traders would resume their trafficking of enslaved Africans.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6189\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]9.1\r\n| Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, Romanticism\r\nand the Radical Representation of Race<\/h1>\r\n
![\"Shipwreck](\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Thankful_Poor#\/media\/File:The_Thankful_Poor,_1894._Henry_Ossawa_Tanner.jpg\")
<\/a> Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, The Raft of the Medusa, <\/cite> 1819. Oil on canvas. 491 x 716 cm. Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nTheir fears were not unfounded. The restored Bourbon government commanded an expedition to recover the Senegal colony, an important symbol of French colonial ambitions in West Africa, and install its own administration, as well as restore a now covert slave trade. A convoy of ships set off from France on July 17, 1816. Over four hundred people were on board the flagship Medusa, among them the new governor of Senegal, settlers, an army regiment, and a group of government officials. Also aboard were abolitionists whose mission was to develop a cooperative agricultural industry between the Senegalese and the colonists, a venture through which they hoped to eliminate the practice of enslaved labour.\r\n\r\nAt the ship's helm was Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a minor aristocrat with little naval experience who had been given the post as a reward for his allegiance to the monarchy. When he failed to assess navigational soundings adequately, the ship ran aground on the Arguin Bank off the African shore. What followed was a narrative of horrific human proportions. Only 15 of the 150 people aboard the raft were rescued by the Argus, <\/em>and only ten ultimately survived to recount the horrors of cannibalism and murder. The event was monumentalized by the Romantic painter Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault in his iconic Raft of the Medusa exhibited<\/em> at the Paris Salon under the title Sc\u00e8ne de Naufrage <\/em>(Shipwreck Scene).\r\n\r\nClaire Black McCoy\u2019s essay, \u201cG\u00e9ricault, Raft of the\u00a0Medusa,<\/em>\u201d provides more fully the historical context (Khan Academy, https:\/\/www.khanacademy.org\/humanities\/becoming-modern\/romanticism\/romanticism-in-france\/a\/G\u00e9ricault-raft-of-the-medusa):\r\nThere had never been a painting like\u00a0Raft of the Medusa<\/em>. It was on the grand scale of French history painting (think, for example, of Jacques Louis David's Oath of the Horatii<\/em>) but instead of ideal forms and a moralizing story from history, G\u00e9ricault offered the Salon audience a thoroughly modern, Romantic\u00a0depiction of death and suffering based on a contemporary event that was in the news. To create his painting, G\u00e9ricault investigated everything about the story of the raft and talked with many of the survivors. He then brought all of the research together to create a radical painting that responded to the conservative tradition of history paintings.<\/blockquote>\r\nG\u00e9ricault first learned about the disaster in the Paris newspapers. Then two of the survivors, the ship\u2019s surgeon, Henri Savigny, and the engineer, Alexandre Corr\u00e9ard, published accounts of their experiences on the raft. G\u00e9ricault interviewed them both and worked with other survivors as well. The painter went to the French coast to study the movement of ships on the water. He examined images of the raft\u2019s design and the\u00a0Medusa<\/em>\u2019s carpenter, who had built the raft, gave G\u00e9ricault a miniature copy of it. G\u00e9ricault began drawing the bodies of the living and the dead, then working out the scene in watercolour and oil sketches trying to figure out what to show the viewers and just how to do it. The process required over 100 studies that moved through each episode of the story.\r\n\r\nIn Raft of the Medusa<\/em>, G\u00e9ricault chose to represent the dramatic moment of hope when the distant ship Argus<\/em> was first sighted. That he articulated it through the image of a black man at the apex of the composition is significant. Poised at the top of the painting, the sailor waves a red rag at the distant, passing ship. Beneath him on the makeshift raft is a pyramidal composition of living bodies and corpses.\r\n\r\nThe political impact of the work cannot be underestimated. The tragedy of the Medusa had become a full-blown scandal, calling into question the politics of France's Restoration government.\u00a0 And although slavery was only superficially discussed in connection with G\u00e9ricault's painting, it was fundamental to its intended meaning.\r\n\r\nThe commander's trial had become the trial of the monarchy, rallying the liberal opposition. G\u00e9ricault's placement of a black figure at the top of his pyramidal composition, instead of at its base, was symbolically charged.\r\n\r\nKlaus Berger and Diane Chalmers Johnson in \u201cArt as Confrontation: The Black Man in the Work of G\u00e9ricault\u201d (The Massachusetts Review<\/em> 10, no. 2 (1969): 301\u201340) connect the black man in the Raft of the Medusa<\/em> with other depictions of blacks by G\u00e9ricault.\r\n
G\u00e9ricault realized also that through the black man his art could deal with the concepts of modern society in a concrete way, and that such an art could then become a means of social and political confrontation. For G\u00e9ricault, born in a time when Libert\u00e9, Egalit\u00e9, Fraternit\u00e9<\/em> were legally established as the goals of society, the discrepancy between these high-minded ideals and the terrible realities of slavery was too obvious. He was determined to bring the people and the Establishment of his country face to face with their hypocrisy.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6191\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, Boxers, <\/cite> 1818. Lithograph. 35.4 x 41.9 cm (image). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nHis interest in prints led him, indirectly, to an important awareness. In 1818 he made a lithograph of a Prize Fight <\/em>[Boxers<\/em>]\u2026. In this irrelevant piece of pictorial cartoon G\u00e9ricault hit upon an answer to his urgent questions: How can an artist deal pictorially with abstract concepts such as Freedom, the Rights of Man, the Equality of All Men? How was a painter to make known his passionate political convictions without resorting to the cartoon? How could he, G\u00e9ricault, use the monumental artistic traditions of the past to deal explicitly with the complex of appalling social problems in the life about him? A glance at this English boxing print gave him an answer: the Negro.\r\n\r\n\u2026\r\n\r\nIn his own version of the Prize Fight<\/em> G\u00e9ricault did not depict merely the specific match between a Black named Molineaux and an Englishman named Crib; he created a visual embodiment of the whole problem of Black versus White. ...There is no hint here of winner or loser. The two men are represented as completely equal in physical strength and courage and are placed in equally dominant positions in the composition.\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6192\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"250\"]<\/a> B. Henry Savigny, and Alexander Corr\u00e9ard, Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816; Undertaken by Order of the French Government, Comprising an Account of the Shipwreck of the Medusa, the Sufferings of the Crew, and the Various Occurrences on Board the Raft, in the Desert of Zaara, at St. Louis, and At the Camp of Daccard. To Which are Subjoined Observations Respecting the Agriculture of the Western Coast of Africa, From Cape Blanco to the Mouth of the Gambia <\/cite>(London: Printed for Henry Colburn, 1818).View Source<\/a>[\/caption]<\/blockquote>\r\nG\u00e9ricault's interest in the Medusa was inspired in part by Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 <\/em> a book written by J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Corr\u00e9ard. The publication's impact was significant; it was translated into English and French and reprinted in multiple editions.\r\n\r\nG\u00e9ricault recognized the story's importance beyond its tragic narrative. He was interested in the fact that French nationals wishing to escape the despotism of the French Restoration government were also aboard the Medusa<\/em>, their mission to resume the administration of the French by living cooperatively among the Senegalese. The book describes the controversy of their stance:\r\nTheir attitude towards the Negro was \"enlightened,\" that is, they believed Negroes \"should be prepared for their new condition [emancipation] as well by instruction as by the progressive amelioration of their situation.\" The captain of the Medusa<\/em>, on the other hand, was an incompetent, elderly and reactionary emigre, who owed his appointment to government patronage. Was it possible that this captain had set the raft adrift purposely in order to assure his own safety? Certainly he would have thought of many of these men leaving France as deserters, even traitors. Whatever the truth of the story, evidently G\u00e9ricault saw far more in this contemporary catastrophe than a merely sensational, gruesome happening. He saw in it a chance to attack the Bourbon monarchy, and he took it.<\/blockquote>\r\nG\u00e9ricault was twenty-seven when he began to work on the immense painting. He was politically astute and fully aware that the size of the work would restrict it to museum display, thus bringing it directly to the public's attention. He isolated himself in his large studio throughout the spring and summer of 1818, completing the work by August, in time for the opening of the Salon on August 25, 1819. Berger and Chalmers recount the contrary reactions it elicited:\r\n
As one writer has put it, \"G\u00e9ricault's success rested not only on his artistic qualities. If he wanted to provoke a political scandal, he calculated only too well. The government would not allow the name Medusa<\/em> in the catalogue, and substituted the harmless title, Shipwreck Scene<\/em>. The public quickly restored the right name, and political sympathies were given free reign. Some congratulated G\u00e9ricault on his courageous attitude as a citizen, others blamed him severely for his choice of subject. Whoever let the Medusa stir him to sympathy, indirectly brought the government of Louis XVIII into disrepute.\" G\u00e9ricault himself recognized that the criticisms leveled against his painting were largely dependent upon the political stance of the particular critic: \"This year our journalists have reached the pinnacle of the ridiculous. Every picture is judged first on the spirit in which it is painted. So you will hear a liberal writer praising the patriotic brush-stroke or the nationalist color of a certain work. The same work, judged by a reactionary, is not only a revolutionary composition dominated by a generally seditious tone, but also one in which the faces are filled with an expression of hatred for our paternal government. Finally, I have been accused by a certain White Banner of having libelled the entire Navy Department in one 'character' head.\"<\/span>\r\n\r\nIn spite of the many criticisms made of the Raft of the Medusa<\/em>, one imagines that secretly G\u00e9ricault must have been pleased at the tremendous public reaction to the political and social indictments of the painting's theme. Not only is the Navy indeed accused of incompetence by the tragedy itself; the entire government, as well as the public, is forced to accept the work or be accused of discrimination, for there at the climax of the scene, the one man strong enough to attract salvation for the rest, is the Negro. G\u00e9ricault forced a confrontation through this painting, a confrontation of the people of France with the depiction of a black man as not only an equal, but perhaps a superior being.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6194\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, A Young Negro Woman,<\/cite> ca. 1810. Oil on canvas. 40 x 31 cm. Mus\u00e9e Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nThrough numerous oil sketches, such as Negro Woman<\/em><\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6195\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, Head of a Black Man, <\/cite> ca. 1818-19. Black chalk. 24.8 x 17.5 cm. Morgan Library & Museum, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nand several studies of Negro heads, as well as in chalk drawings, G\u00e9ricault goes beyond generalizations to recognize the beauty and delineate the unique variations of these personalities. The schematic profile of the Negro boxer is quickly superseded by portrait-like, illusionistic presentations.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6196\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, The Raft of the Medusa, <\/cite> 1819. Oil on canvas. 491 x 716 cm. Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nThis individualistic representation of the black man is carried into the final painting of the Raft of the Medusa<\/em>, especially in the figure to the right of the mast.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6197\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Detail of Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, The Raft of the Medusa,<\/cite> 1819. Oil on canvas. 491 x 716 cm. Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nThis black man, though individual in physique, has his face turned from us towards the distant ship, the source of his deliverance from the misery of the raft. The man remains anonymous, a symbol of all black men urgently seeking liberation. Through this fusion of the factual account of the event with the grand composition and heroic gestures of traditional classical art, G\u00e9ricault monumentalizes the incident and the men of this modern tragedy.\r\n\r\n\u2026\r\n\r\nOne of the last and unexecuted projects planned by G\u00e9ricault was a monumental painting, or series of paintings, depicting the moral and physical horrors of slavery. The abolition of slavery, for which G\u00e9ricault appeals here, was first achieved in England. During the artist's visit in 1820-21, the English abolitionists had already begun organizing an Anti-Slavery Society, which by 1823 was publishing periodicals on the appalling conditions of the slaves. England finally abolished slavery in 1833, while France, moving more slowly, granted the Negro freedom in 1848.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6198\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, The Slave Market, <\/cite>ca. 1823. Pen and red chalk. \u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Reproduced in Klaus Berger, and Diane Chalmers Johnson, \u201cArt as Confrontation: The Black Man in the Work of G\u00e9ricault.\u201d View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nSenegal continued to be a notorious clearing point for slave traffic. The demand for slaves in the West Indies and the southern United States made clandestine traffic worth any risk, and the profits involved incited large-scale bribery.\r\n\r\nG\u00e9ricault's The Slave Market<\/em> portrays a \u00a0captive black man, hands bound behind his back and neck encased in an iron collar, about to be brutally beaten by a slaver. A black woman struggles to defend him from the flogging. The cruelty depicted extends beyond the aggression. The image speaks of the separation of husbands, wives, and children, a strategy designed to break the human spirit of enslaved families. G\u00e9ricault's image succinctly contrasts the inhumanity of the slavers with the powerlessness of their captives. To abolitionists, scenes such as this confirmed the devolution of slave traders into sadistic monsters who had lost their moral compass. Berger and Chalmers:\r\nIn his conception of the slavery paintings, G\u00e9ricault drew on earlier tendencies. Like the Raft of the Medusa<\/em>, these were to be huge works in the grand tradition of Western painting, meant to confront the viewer with the horrible realities of slavery. The more complete drawing deals with the cruelties of the Slave Marke<\/em>t,<\/blockquote>\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6199\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, The Slave Trade, <\/cite> 1823. Pen. 10.5 x 13.3 cm. Mus\u00e9e Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne.\u00a0 Reproduced in Klaus Berger, and Diane Chalmers Johnson. \u201cArt as Confrontation: The Black Man in the Work of G\u00e9ricault.\u201d View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nthe other with the lonely despair of women and children separated from their husbands and fathers, doomed regardless of age or sex to inhuman treatment and early death. Surely G\u00e9ricault had scenes such as these etched in his imagination by the publications of the abolitionists\u2026\r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\nIn this later work the true social situation is rendered in dramatic naturalism: the slave is helpless in the hands of his captor tormentor; and anguished women, beaten and torn from their men, replace the jolly English spectators of the Prize Fight<\/em>. Again G\u00e9ricault uses all the strength of the classical grand tradition to render the scene clearly and forcefully, and again he tempers this classicism with naturalistic representation and the simple and somewhat exaggerated dramatic gestures of the popular prints. Although G\u00e9ricault was undoubtedly inspired by the themes and even the compositions of such prints, he overcame the insignificance, the narrowness of this genre art by applying the insights obtained through his long studies of classical reliefs and great Italian and French painting. His aim was the monumental fresco depicting the epic events of his own day \"with buckets of color,\" as he put it. This expressive synthesis was conceived by G\u00e9ricault, but never realized. The artist died in January of 1824 at the age of thirty-two.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6200\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Th\u00e9odore G\u00e9ricault, The Raft of the Medusa, <\/cite>1819. Oil on canvas. 491 x 716 cm. Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, Paris. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nLorenz Eitner, in French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century<\/em> (Part I: Before Impressionism<\/em>, 2000 (excerpt, https:\/\/www.nga.gov\/collection\/artist-info.1334.html) discusses the significance of G\u00e9ricault\u2019s sojourn in Italy where he saw Michelangelo\u2019s Last Judgment<\/em>.\r\nIn March 1816 he competed for the academic Rome Prize but failed the contest and decided to undertake the voyage on his own account. His Italian stay in 1816-1817 gave him profound impressions of paintings of heroic size that further stimulated his interest in problems of style and whetted his appetite for work on the wall-filling scale.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6201\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Michelangelo, The Last Judgement, <\/cite>ca. 1534-41. Fresco. 13.7 x 12 m. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6202\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> Michelangelo, detail from The Last Judgement, <\/cite>ca. 1534-41. Fresco. 13.7 x 12 m. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nThe enormous canvas represents an episode of a recent shipwreck that had violently aroused French public opinion. The problem that G\u00e9ricault set himself in composing his picture was to combine the immediacy of an eyewitness account with the permanence and stability of monumental composition. He thus sought to unite the two antithetical aspects of his art in a grand synthesis, reconciling historical realism with heroic generality: the modern shipwreck was made to echo Michelangelo's Last Judgment<\/em>.<\/blockquote>\r\nScholarly interpretations of the Raft of the Medusa<\/em> have been numerous over the years and have stimulated critical assessments. Here is a recent noteworthy example by Ken Lum.\r\n\r\nLum maintains that \u201cmost art historical treatments of\u00a0The Raft of the\u00a0Medusa<\/em>\u00a0have concentrated on the allegorical functioning of the painting; its image of despair and degeneracy \u2026. In fact there has been surprisingly little analysis in terms of the painting\u2019s other functioning as a radical expression of racial and sexual permutability within modernity.\u201d (\u201cOn Board The Raft of the Medusa\u201d in Everything Is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018<\/em>, 35\u201341; originally published in\u00a0Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art<\/em>\u00a010 (1999):\u00a0 14\u201317) \u00a0<\/em>\r\n(https:\/\/www.design.upenn.edu\/fine-arts\/graduate\/post\/excerpt-ken-lum-g%C3%A9ricaults-raft-medusa).\r\n\r\nLum's argument is as follows:\r\n
In G\u00e9ricault\u2019s painting, everyone is literally on the same boat with hardly a shred of clothing to distinguish officer from seaman and slave from slave trader. Although the depicted scene is a tragic one, the grouping of bodies on the raft can be read unitarily as a community.\r\n\r\nThe raft functions as a platform of interspersed sexual and racial codes, metonymically split from the false decorousness and rigidly stratified constitution of French society of the period. More particularly, the composition of the human pyramid aboard the raft is meant to mirror the social composition of France\u2019s apparatus of empire, built to a large extent as it was on the backs of male African slaves.\r\n\r\n\u2026\r\n\r\nThe\u00a0Medusa\u00a0painting is an image that upsets power relations because it articulated modern ideas of multiple social roles but it could only do so on the largely imaginary and deculturated setting of G\u00e9ricault's canvas.\r\n\r\n\u2026\r\n\r\nThe important artistic problem for G\u00e9ricault was how to negotiate a meeting of mutuality without ceding his art to mere illustration of historical fact. His solution was to highlight the salience of race and male sexuality in the raft narrative by dislodging both terms from their normative and socially fixed meanings. Throughout his career, G\u00e9ricault insisted on the prominence of both discursive terms in the configuration of modernity.\r\n\r\nThe rationalization for a full realization of human freedom for slaves was consistently compromised by the faith invested in the guidance provided by positivistic thought and the empirical sciences that in G\u00e9ricault\u2019s time made many racist claims on the person of the slave. A common view among Europeans held that the black body was a savage body, descended from a tribe of cannibals. Homologies between racist science and the slave trade were widely accepted because the equation of blacks with cannibalism, for example, offered the convenience of one more racial justification for slavery. Both G\u00e9ricault and the Salon public were familiar with the accounts of cannibalism that had taken place on the raft, measures taken out of desperation to survive. But in the artist\u2019s\u00a0Medusa\u00a0painting, cannibalism is not essentialized as a property intrinsic to the black person. Rather, it is something generalized to both the white body and black body. The artist seems to be saying that in a diseased situation anyone can become a cannibal.\r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\nThe\u00a0Raft of the\u00a0Medusa\u00a0<\/em>did not conform neatly to contemporary perceptions about alterity; what it more accurately conformed to were contemporary facts about alterity not yet understood. The discourse of colonization meant the increasing inscription of the Other within the space of the same.\r\n\r\nG\u00e9ricault\u2019s\u00a0Medusa<\/em>\u00a0functioned as a signpost of multi-racial hybridity, one that effected what Homi Bhabha has described as the unfixing of the authority of colonial discourse by the voice of the Other. As such,\u00a0The Raft of the\u00a0Medusa\u00a0<\/em>operates in what bell hooks refers to as a counter-hegemonic cultural production. The painting is an expression of G\u00e9ricault\u2019s reflection on the profound precariousness of traditional conceptions of race and sexuality at the dawn of the modern industrial age. He understood that to think historically about slavery was to grapple with a profound ambiguity, that slavery continued to thrive in a period marked by profound opposition.\r\n\r\nThis led G\u00e9ricault to draw upon the subconscious force of the image of the black African in order to challenge its basis. His challenge came at a time when debates about the slave trade coincided with what Heinrich Heine has called the new revolutionary force of money. Norbert Elias has pointed out that \u201cthe reproduction of capital is tied to the reproduction of slaves, and thus directly or indirectly to the success of military campaigns.\u201d It has been argued that international finance entered into the modern era after the French debacle at Waterloo in 1815, merely a year before the\u00a0Medusa\u00a0tragedy, when there was a decisive shift in influence from nation-states to financial institutions such as the House of Rothschild and Baring Brothers.\r\n\r\nThe penetration of European money into Africa, Asia, and the Americas spurred new entrepreneurial agencies of European colonialism that established a global division of labour of unprecedented exploitative power. Despite its language of indignity, opposition to slavery was often in practice an argument for a new form of indentured labour. The work of slaves would be recast in new terms, as agricultural labourers legally and economically bonded to France, free only to the extent of the slave wages offered.<\/blockquote>\r\n
9.2\r\n| The Atlantic Slave Trade: Records and Reverberations<\/h1>\r\nTwo decades after G\u00e9ricault's Raft of the Medusa<\/em> was shown at the Paris Salon, and within a month of the opening of London's World Anti-Slavery Convention in June 1840, the English Romanticist J.M.W. Turner's The Slave Ship<\/em> was exhibited at the Royal Academy. The timeliness of the painting's public showing on the heels of the Anti-Slavery Convention contributed to its impact.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6203\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship, <\/cite>1840. Oil on canvas. 90.8 x 122.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6204\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Blunt, Meeting of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade & For the Civilization of Africa, <\/cite>1840. Engraving by James Harris. New York Public Library. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe Anti-Slavery Convention was organized by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1787, the same year as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The twelve male members comprised nine Quakers and three Anglicans, including Thomas Clarkson. Through their efforts, the Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807, its purpose to abolish the slave trade.\u00a0 From 1823 to 1838, the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions lobbied to bring about the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, advocated by William Wilberforce. By August 1834, some 800,000 enslaved people in the British empire had been freed. The work had just begun. The need to campaign for anti-slavery worldwide resulted in the founding of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) in 1839 and the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, the latter only permitting access to male delegates, of whom 200 were British, 50 American and a minor number of attendees from other countries.\r\n\r\nJake Thurman in \u201cOrigins and Overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (sixteenth to nineteenth century CE)\u201d (World History Project, https:\/\/www.oerproject.com\/-\/media\/WHP\/PDF\/Era5\/WHP-5-4-2-Read---The-Transatlantic-Slave-Trade---1140L.ashx) explains how and why the transatlantic slave trade came about, how it affected the lives of those enslaved and what the consequences were for Africa, Europe, and the Americas.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6205\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Triangle trade. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nSlavery is one of the most devastating things that one group of humans can subject another group to, and it is an extremely complex topic. The arrival of Europeans in the Americas caused major changes in the social, political, cultural, demographic, economic, and environmental aspects of the Western Hemisphere. The needs and desires of elites determined how land and laborers in the New World were exploited. Though on a different continent, the goal was to support the economic growth of European communities. The shift to plantation agriculture in Brazil and the Caribbean meant that sugar could now be produced and exported on a large scale. This created a demand for labor. Spaniards and Portuguese did not want to work in the fields; they wanted to own the fields. European diseases had wiped out indigenous populations, and conversion to Christianity made some indigenous peoples exempt from certain types of forced labor. As a result, Europeans looked to Africa for a new source of workers. Africans were deemed suitable for work in the Americas because they were unfamiliar with the land and so less likely to escape, largely resistant to European diseases, accustomed to laboring in the tropics, and came from farming cultures. Scholars still debate how much race had to do with Europeans' initial decision to enslave Africans. Certainly at the height of the slave trade and in the centuries that followed, the notion of racial inferiority was used by Europeans to justify the enslavement of millions of Africans. Other justifications included religion and concepts of \"civilization.\" To the English, for example, pagan people were candidates for enslavement. They argued that the absence of Christian belief and behavior made people inferior and that they lacked the capacity to be \"civilized.\"\r\n\r\nThe Atlantic slave trade began shortly after the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas. The transatlantic leg of the African slave trade most likely began with a Portuguese slaving voyage from Africa to the Americas in 1526. The earliest efforts were copied and accelerated by later Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch voyages. All told, approximately 12.5 million Africans were taken from the coast of Africa to the Americas, though about 2.5 million of those died during the voyage. The sheer volume and violence of the trade sets it apart from the types of slavery that existed earlier in history. Complex links between networks of slave traders in Africa trying to meet Europe's demand led many of those 12.5 million humans being forcibly taken from Africa.\r\n\r\nBut there were other Africans who were forced into bondage through war and societal collapse. The violence of the trade was undeniable, as slavers from the coasts journeyed inland and used their military advantage to prey upon smaller agricultural societies and their populations. It is true that many of those doing the enslaving were themselves Africans. However, European demand and economic muscle clearly drove the trade and maximized its volume. Europe had the demand, the traders on Africa's coasts had the supply, so slavery became a major business. As slave traders provided more enslaved people to European colonies in the Americas, many communities in Africa simply collapsed. Africans and Europeans both cited factors such as economics, religion, and race and ethnic divisions to justify the enslavement of millions of people based upon factors such as economics, religion, and racial and ethnic divisions.<\/blockquote>\r\n
9.3\r\n| Abolition and Aesthetics in Britain: J. M.W. Turner's Slave Ship<\/em><\/h1>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6206\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship, <\/cite>1840. Oil on canvas. 90.8 x 122.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nTurner's The Slave Ship<\/em> was inspired by accounts of the late 18th-century slave ship Zong, which had jettisoned human cargo at sea to collect insurance money.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6207\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, <\/cite> vol. 1 (New York: John S. Taylor, 1836). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe story appeared the year before the exhibition in the new addition of Clarkson's History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade,<\/em> which described how in 1783, 152 enslaved men had been thrown overboard while still alive. The Zong ship had lost its way; 60 slaves and seven crew members had died of an epidemic, and the water supply was depleting. The survivors were in poor health, and the captain knew many would die before the ship reached its destination. Because insurance compensation could only be claimed for those slaves \"lost at sea,\" but not those who had expired on board, he contrived to cast three groups of men to their fates at sea.\r\n\r\nRobert Leo Costello, in \"The Center Cannot Hold: J. M. W. Turner's Contemporary History Paintings in the Age of Revolution\" (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 2002), notes that\r\n\r\nThe only sign of the slaves being thrown overboard in the painting is the shackled leg, hands and chains that slide into the water in the foreground, but it is referred to directly in the verse-tag which accompanied the entry in the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue. The verses read:\r\n\"Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;\r\nYon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds\r\nDeclare the Typhon's coming.\r\nBefore it sweeps your decks, throw overboard\r\nThe dead and dying - ne'er heed their chains\r\nHope, Hope, fallacious Hope!\r\nWhere is thy market now?\"<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6208\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship, <\/cite>1840. Oil on canvas. 90.8 x 122.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nSlave Ship<\/em> was ridiculed at the Royal Academy. The Times<\/em> remarked that it was \"impossible to look at without mingled feelings of pity and contempt ... the leg of a negro which is about to afford a nibble to John Dory, a pair of soles, and a shoal of whitebait.\" In the Athenaeum<\/em> May 15, it was a \"passionate extravagance of marigold sky, and pomegranate-coloured sea and fish dressed as gay as garden flowers in pink and green with one shapeless dusky-brown leg thrown up from this parti-coloured chaos\" (quoted in Albert Boime, \u201cTurner's Slave Ship: The Victims of Empire,\u201d Turner Studies<\/em>, 10 no. 1 (1990): 34\u201343).\r\n\r\nThere are multilayered meanings to Slave Ship<\/em>, writes Costello. He summarizes two key writings, the first \u00a0by Boime.\r\n\r\nBoime relates the visual and thematic structure of the image to economic issues contemporary to the painting, and argues that it stages the struggle between the plantation system of slavery and the new forces of laissez-faire industrialism of the nineteenth century. According to Boime, the painting\u2019s fiery sunset is a metaphor for the \u201cpassing of the outmoded institution [of slavery] in the context of the new industrialized state.\u201d Boime\u2019s metaphorical interpretation depends upon the identification of the ship as the Zong because it places British participation in the slave system firmly in the past. The ship\u2019s conflict with the storm can then be made, in his account, to represent the conflict of slavery with the new industrial forces of the nineteenth century.\r\n\r\nA particularly relevant part of Boime\u2019s article is about William Makepeace Thackeray, a British novelist, author and illustrator.\u00a0 Boime relates that Thackery, who was a racist, wrote to his mother on 26 January 1853 while visiting slaveholder friends in the southern United States.\r\n\"Sambo is not my man and my brother, the very aspect of his face is grotesque and inferior. I can't help seeing and owning this, at the same time denying any white man's right to hold this fellow creature in bondage and make goods and chattels of him and his issue.\"<\/blockquote>\r\nLike most members of his group, he assuaged his guilt through the caricatural depiction of ethnic groups as sub-human. In fact he returned home believing that the working poor in England were worse off and more miserable than Black slaves in America. He also felt that England should clean up its act before advising other countries on slave issues.\r\n
\"Of course we feel the cruelty of flogging and enslaving a negro- they feel here the cruelty of starving an English labourer or driving an English child to a mine - Brother, Brother we are kin.\"<\/blockquote>\r\nThe second interpretation summarized by Costello is John McCoubrey\u2019s \u201cTurner\u2019s Slave Ship: Abolition, Ruskin and Reception\u201d (Word and Image<\/em> 14, no 4 (1998):\u00a0 319-53):\r\n
John McCoubrey, however, has suggested that a very different moment is represented in the Slave Ship<\/em>. While Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1806, a number of other nations, including Spain and Portugal, continued to engage in it in the 1840's. British warships patrolled the waters of the West Coast of Africa in an effort to stop them, but because captains were given prize money for slaves captured on the open sea but not for those still on shore or in the harbor, many captains allowed the slave-ships to leave the coast before pursuing them. A frequent result of this tactic was that the slavers jettisoned slaves to lighten their ships as they tried to outrun the patrol. This issue of pursuit and jettison was a highly controversial public concern in 1840, and, according to McCoubrey, it is such a scene which Turner depicts in the Slave Ship<\/em>.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6209\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> Lieutenant Henri Samuel Hawker, The Portuguese slaver Diligent\u00e9 captured by H.M. Sloop Pearl with 600 slaves on board, taken in charge to Nassau, <\/cite>1838. Watercolour on paper (fiber product). 28.9 x 43.5 cm. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nAs evidence, he points to the shape of the slave-ship which he finds similar to those used by the Spanish and the Portuguese in those years and slaving vessels.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6210\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]
<\/a> Detail of Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship,<\/cite> 1840. Oil on canvas. 90.8 x 122.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nHe also points to the blue and white object in the water in the middle-left of the painting, which he reads as a Portuguese flag of trade also in use in the late 1830\u2026 McCoubrey also discusses at length the considerable public debate over the continued practice of the slave trade as well as the role of the British navy. McCoubrey has thus brought an important new aspect of the slave trade issue into play in relation to this painting and shown that it was indeed a very topical work of art.<\/span>\r\n\r\nHere is McCoubrey\u2019s description of a detail of the painting:\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6211\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Detail of Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship,<\/cite> 1840. Oil on canvas. 90.8 x 122.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nIf we allow Turner the necessity of painting on the surface of the sea the horrors that should be hidden in its depths, the figures are not much more bizarre than the anomalous behavior of the ship, the misplaced swells and belated storm we have mentioned. The most arresting figure is a woman, scarcely mentioned in 1840, who has been the focus of the most hostile criticism. Her right leg, an iron fetter around its ankle, is upthrust, and her breasts are clearly visible just above the frame. In a cruel frenzy, carnivorous fish feed upon her, led by one whose eyes and mouth unmistakably express human malevolence, relating its assault to the human profiteers from slavery and its trade. The leg is seen against a large, indistinct, whitish form of what must be a shark whose mouth appears to her right, and whose large fin or back rises close behind it. Because of its alignment, it is tempting to conclude that this monster is swallowing the woman's other leg, the fish claiming its 'legacy' noticed in a ghastly pun by a hostile reviewer in 1840; but, since it is clearly a right foot upraised, the other leg of the victim is to the left.\r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\nIt is not surprising that this seeming fantasy was not taken seriously, much less understood, as a public protest. In 1840, the naked, upside-down woman was not only an affront to the decorum of high art, but a violation of common morality that forfeited the painting's claim to address any moral issue.<\/blockquote>\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6212\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Fran\u00e7ois-Auguste Biard, The Slave Trade (Slaves on the West Coast of Africa),<\/cite> ca. 1833. Oil on canvas. 162.5 x 228.6 cm. Wilberforce House Museum, Hull. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nCostello also suggests that Biard\u2019s The Slave Trade<\/em> was exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1840, the same year as Turner\u2019s painting,\r\n\r\n... had considerably less dangerous implications for a British audience. Because the title of the painting placed its atrocities so specifically on the African coast, rather than in the colonies, there could be no direct implication of guilt to a contemporary audience in Britain. What guilt there was could be firmly placed in the past, allowing the image to fit very comfortably into the dominant model of abolition that I have described, which held Britain to be cleansed of sin, having ended its role in slave trading. Turner\u2019s image on the other hand, with its dialectical structure of reference, suggested a much more complex, less progressive model of history in which British guilt was not so easily eliminated.<\/blockquote>\r\nSam Smiles in \u201cTurner and the Slave Trade: Speculation and Representation, 1805-40\u201d (British Art Journal<\/em> 8, no. 3 (2007): 47\u201354) discusses a key piece of evidence that confirms Turner\u2019s \u201cdeeply skeptical view of abolition.\u201d\r\n
It comes as a surprise, therefore, to find that in 1805 Turner invested in a Jamaican speculation whose profits were entirely dependent on slave labour. The Dry Sugar Work pen in St Catherine's parish was an estate of about 1500 acres close to Spanish Town, whose primary business was intended to be the raising of cattle for the local market. Currently encumbered with a mortgage of \u00a32530, an investment scheme was devised to pay this off, buy sufficient slaves to run the property effectively and remit the ensuing profits to the subscribers.\r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\nTurner cannot have been in any doubt regarding what he was investing in. The printed Proposals for the tontine, having enumerated the property's potential to deliver a substantial income, clearly state that . . . \"these Objects cannot be accomplished without a large Gang of Negroes; the Money is therefore to be laid out in the Purchase of Negroes ... the Number of Negroes thereby purchased, will of themselves form a full Security for the Money, independent of the present and the daily increasing Value of the Estate. Negroes always greatly increase in Value, after they have been some time in the Island, so as to double the Amount of their first Price, after allowing any casual Loss by Death.\"\r\n\r\nAll these assets could be sold for profit, except the slaves, who were too valuable to dispose of. Given the strength of the abolitionist campaign in the early 1800s, this last clause may have been included as a reassurance to the investors that even were the slave trade to be outlawed the Dry Sugar Work pen would maintain its slave population.\r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\n[It] seems reasonable to suggest that Turner's investment in the tontine points to an uncritical view of slavery in the 1800s and, correspondingly, that his humanitarian feelings for the victims of the slave trade and his endorsement of abolition did not exist much before the later 1820s.<\/blockquote>\r\n
9.4\r\n| Picturing Enslavement: Genre, Race and Stereotype in Antebellum America<\/h1>\r\nThe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the widespread forcible removal of Africans from their homeland to the American colonies to be exploited as labourers in the production of tobacco and cotton crops. By the mid-19th century, the controversy surrounding America\u2019s westward expansion and the rise of the abolition movement in the States incited a debate over slavery that tore America apart, culminating in the bloody Civil War. Even though four million enslaved people were liberated, the legacy of slavery continued to impact the nation in myriad ways, including challenging its collective identity and how artists found ways to represent it.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6213\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> William Sidney Mount, Farmers Nooning, <\/cite>1836. Oil on canvas. 52.1 x 62.2 cm. Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages, Stony Brook. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6214\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]<\/a> William Sidney Mount, Farmers Nooning, <\/cite>1836. Engraving. 47.7 x 55.5 cm. Library of Congress, Washington. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWilliam Sydney Mount, an American painter from Long Island, was the first native-born artist to specialize in genre paintings of quotidian life in rural America. His realistic scenes reveal a particular interest in the depiction of African Americans, whom he often portrayed as smiling.\r\n\r\nMount was born into a prosperous family of slave owners in Setauket, Long Island (slavery was only abolished in New York in 1827). His attitude was paternalistic, his much-quoted phrase that \"a Negro is as good as a White man-as long as he behaves himself,\" summarizing his innate beliefs. Frederick C. Moffatt explains in \u201cBarnburning and Hunkerism: William Sidney Mount\u2019s Power of Music<\/em>\u201d (Winterthur Portfolio<\/em> 29, no. 1 (1994): 19\u201342) that this phrase spoke of: \u201cthe innate servility of the black race, of the humane treatment black slaves received, of their basically childlike and happy natures, of their acceptance of their status as property in Southern white society, of the economic benefits the nation reaped from the products of slavery \u2026\u00a0 As personal property, the slave could expect birth-to-death protection and nurturing from his master.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe assumption that African Americans were carefree was linked to slavers' beliefs that they possessed limited intelligence. To those who supported slavery, they were regarded as savage beings who could be domesticated only in captivity. The fact that obedience and docility were the result of brutality was unrecognized or unheeded.\r\n\r\nThe trope of the \"lovable slave\" was positioned against that of the \"monstrous freedman.\" Enslaved adults were regarded as dependent children but were deliberately kept from an education that would advance their cause. While laws in most Southern states barred slaves from schooling, their independent efforts to educate themselves, sometimes with the aid of their \"owners,\" is well-documented.\r\n\r\nThe laziness of black Americans was a stereotype propagated by slave owners to justify their barbarous actions .\u201cIt was the general testimony of slaveholders... [that the Negro was] habitually indolent and opposed to exertion, which condition necessitated a master to force him to work.\u201d (William Sumner Jenkins, Proslavery Thought in the Old South<\/em> (University of North Carolina Press, 1935),\u00a0 251).\r\n\r\nIn Mount's Farmers Nooning, <\/em>we see a striking contrast between the representation of the indolent black man sporting a smile and napping on a stack of hay and the industrious white Yankee honing his scythe sharpener, the implication being that whites alone could stay alert during a noonday break. The black man was further demeaned here by being cast as the butt of a joke, fast asleep while being tickled with a straw. African Americans were common victims of practical jokes in early 19th-century images, accentuating the assumption of gullibility and feebleness.\r\n\r\nKaren M. Adams writes in \u201cThe Black Image in the Paintings of William Sidney Mount\u201d (American Art Journal<\/em> 7, no. 2 (1975): 42\u201359):\r\nIn Farmers Nooning<\/em> Mount has painted a subtle allegory on the subject of work. For this enduringly popular painting, which was lithographed by the Apollo Association and later by the American Art Union and published in \"Godey's Lady's Book,\" Mount utilized the stereotype of the lazy, carefree Negro, a type readily recognized and accepted by his contemporary audience.\r\n\r\nYet, despite the device of the small boy with the teasing straw, this black man is no caricature. He is, as one of Mount's reviewers recognized, \"the masterpiece of the composition.\"' Placed in the sunlight, in a pose of luxuriant abandon reminiscent of the sleeping Ariadne, he dominates the scene.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6215\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> James Goodwyn Clonney, Waking Up,<\/cite> 1851. Oil on canvas. 68.9 x 55.8 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThis painting is a subversive attack on the Puritan maxim to make hay while the sun shines, although its subtler message may have been lost on most of his audience and on his imitators\u2013like James Goodwin Clonney, who in the 1851 painting <\/span>Waking Up<\/em> perpetuated the stereotype but borrowed none of the modifying qualities of grace and beauty that characterized Mount's sleeping black man.<\/span>\r\n\r\nThe association of the black with natural grace and sensuousness, with a relaxed attitude and a love of pleasure, was part of a concept that reassured American slaveholders that black men were more like animals than were white men; but these same qualities were cited in the 1830's, '40's, and '50's by reformers and abolitionists such as Alexander Kinmont and Th\u00e9odore Tilton in defense of the notion that black men had more natural Christian virtue than did white men. This romantic idea was as much a critique of American society as it was a defense of anti-slavery.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6216\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]<\/a> Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin <\/cite> (London: H. G. Bohn, 1852). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nIt found its most complete and popular expression in Mrs. Stowe's bestseller.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6217\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Robert Seldon Duncanson,\u00a0Uncle Tom and Little Eva, <\/cite> 1853. Oil on canvas. 69.2 \u00d7 97.2 cm Detroit Institute of Arts. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn his interpretation of Harriet Beecher' Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin<\/em> (1852), Robert Seldon Duncanson addressed the issue of spirituality and race in a romanticized way. Duncanson was the first documented African American landscape artist. He established himself in Cincinnati in the 1840s with the help of funds from the Anti-Slavery League and private patrons where he worked as a painter of still lifes and \"fancy pieces\" after success as an itinerant painter. Racial tensions following the Civil War forced him to leave America for Canada, where he lived in Montreal from 1863 to 1865.\r\n\r\nHis travels to Europe and studies in the European landscape tradition reveal the influence of Turner, Claude Lorrain, and Thomas Cole. Uncle Tom and Little Eva<\/em> was one of only a few of his paintings that dealt directly with African American subjects.\r\n\r\nThe two central characters, Uncle Tom and Little Eva are depicted in the foreground of a lyrical landscape painting. The scene is patterned on an edition of the story which describes the event at the St Clare family's summer home on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. It is sunset on a Sunday evening. Eva stands bathed in light in front of her faithful servant and points to the sky.\u00a0\"Where do you suppose new Jerusalem is, Uncle Tom?\" said Eva.\u00a0\"Oh, up in the clouds, Miss Eva\" he replies. \u00a0\"Then I think I see it,\" said Eva. \" Look in those clouds!\u2014they look like great gates of pearl; and you can see beyond them,\u2014far, far off,\u2014it's all gold. Tom, sing about 'spirits bright.'\"\r\n\r\nThe image illustrates the bond between the Black servant and the white little girl. Its engagement with the spirituality they shared highlights Little Eva's (and thus Stowe's) belief that spiritual and physical salvation for African Americans could be attained through devotion to a Christian God. The blond Eva represents the best of abolitionist sentiment and Christian love, although she dies shortly after the scene by the lake. Still, one discerns a patronizing tone: the child, who is unmistakably blond, will lead the Black man out of darkness and ignorance into salvation and light. White abolitionists saw the passivity of Uncle Tom as evidence of the morality of efforts to free him.\r\n\r\nDuncanson's image maintains the tone of Stowe's text. Little Eva elicits a Christlike association while Uncle Tom's religious devotion to her is immediately perceptible.\r\n\r\nStowe writes, \"Uncle Tom loved her as something frail and earthly, yet almost worshipped her as something heavenly and divine. He gazed on her as the Italian sailor gazes on his image of the child Jesus-with a mixture of reverence and tenderness.\"\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6218\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Edwin M. Stanton, \u201cReport of the Secretary of War, communicating, in compliance with a resolution of the Senate of the 26th of May, a copy of the preliminary report, and also of the final report of the American Freedman\u2019s Inquiry Commission,\u201d 1864. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWhen the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission was formed to advise the government in the aftermath of emancipation, its final report contained a call to religion to help usher freed people and their former owners into the post-slavery era. Adams quotes from the \"Final Report of the American Freedman's Inquiry Commission,\" issued in 1864 at the request of President Lincoln and quoted by Adams:\r\nThe Anglo-Saxon race, with its great force of character, much mental activity, an unflagging spirit of enterprise, has a certain hardness, a stubborn will, only moderate geniality, a lack of habitual cheerfulness. Its intellectual powers are stronger than its social instincts. The head predominates over the heart. There is little that is emotional in its religion \u2026 It is a race more calculated to call forth respect than love, better fitted to do than to enjoy. The African race is in many respects the reverse of this. Genial, lively, docile, emotional, the affections rule; the social instincts maintain the ascendent except under cruel repression, its cheerfulness and love of mirth overflow with the exuberance of childhood. It is devotional by feeling. It is a knowing rather than a thinking race\u2026. As regards the virtues of humility, loving-kindness, resignation under adversity, reliance on Divine Providence, this race exhibits these, as a general rule, in a more marked manner than does the Anglo-Saxon... With time, if we but treat these people in a Christian fashion, we shall have our reward. The softening influence of their genial spirit, diffused throughout the community, will make itself felt as an element of improvement in the national character.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6219\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> William Sidney Mount, The Power of Music, <\/cite>1847. Oil on canvas. 43.4 x 53.5 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nA painting that illustrates the racial divide in America while suggesting a shared humanity between Blacks and Whites is Mount's The Power of Music<\/em>. The scene takes place before the Civil War in rural Long Island. It is a complex, compelling work. It elicited commentary for its unique subject when it was first displayed at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1847.\r\n\r\nThe Power of Music<\/em> portrays an African American labourer as he listens intently to white men playing the fiddle. The figures occupy separate spaces - the white men indoors, the black man outdoors - but they are united by the music they love.\r\n\r\nFrederick C. Moffatt writes in \u201cBarnburning and Hunkerism: William Sidney Mount\u2019s Power of Music\u201d <\/em>(Winterthur Portfolio<\/em> 29, no. 1 (1994): 19\u201342):\r\nWhen The Power of Music<\/em> first was exhibited, The Literary World<\/em> reviewed it at some length as \"one of the most thoroughly original and successful little pictures it has ever been our lot to behold. The subject is one that he has in other ways treated before, but never so successfully as now.\" After discussing the three white men, the anonymous reviewer continued: \"But the triumph of the picture is the negro standing outside the door, out of sight of the main group but certainly not out of hearing. He is an amateur, plays himself, and listens critically, at the same time delightedly. We never saw the faculty of listening so exquisitely portrayed as it is here. Every limb, joint, body, bones, hat, boots, and all, are intent upon the tune.\"\r\n\r\n...\r\n\r\nA New England journalist was equally impressed with the psychological portrayal. \"The scene is a country barn, the hostler is fiddling, the stable boy, a negro wood-sawyer, and one or two others are listening, and never was the power of music more beautifully portrayed than in this rude audience, no longer vulgar, but transfigured. The music has struck the electric cord, and kindled the latent soul that now shines through every feature. To idealize such faces, and such a scene, I conceive to be a great triumph in art.\"\r\n\r\nNeither reviewer mentions the racial implications of The Power of Music<\/em>. An African American labourer is outside a barn listening to a fiddle tune enjoyed by white men inside the barn. A love of music may indicate a shared humanity, but the two races are in different spaces, symbolic of their unmistakable division.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6220\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]
<\/a> William Sidney Mount, The Bone Player, <\/cite>1856. Oil on canvas. 91.76 x 73.98 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]<\/blockquote>\r\nScholars have varied in their interpretation of The Bone Player,<\/em> painted five years before the Civil War. Is the painting a stereotypical image of an African American, or is it a sympathetic portrait of an individual? Mount titled the painting The Bone Player.<\/em> Does this mean that the main subject is the man\u2019s musical ability rather than his identity? The bones of ivory, wood, or bone clicked together were a typical instrument of African American minstrels.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6221\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> Dan D. Emmett, Dandy Jim from Caroline<\/cite> (London: Delmaine & Co., ca. 1844). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWhen Mount was painting his genre pictures, the image of the beaming black minstrel had already been cast into stereotype, aided by the advent of minstrel shows, a form of popular entertainment based on the image of the happy, carefree and child-like slave.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6222\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]<\/a> Photograph of Dan Emmett in blackface, ca. 1860. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn the 1840s, Dan Emmett, an American songwriter and the author of \"Dixie,\" founded the first troupe of Blackface minstrels known as the Virginia Minstrels. The genre became popularised in American theatre. Thus began the fixed image of a toothy-grinned black man wearing tattered clothes, carrying a fiddle, a tambourine or bones, and doing the cakewalk. The iconic image became the standard cover of Emmett's programmes, typically depicting a man strumming a banjo and wearing a freaky facial expression. White racists took the banjo-picking Jim Crow as a stereotypical representation of blacks.\r\n\r\nThis conceptualization was almost universally recognized in the 19th century and partially explains the pervasive caricature of cheery black folk, puppet-like performers even in servitude.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6223\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]<\/a> J.W. Turner, Songs of the Virginia Serenaders<\/cite> (Boston: Keith\u2019s Music Publishing House, 1844). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nBruce Robertson, in \u201c\u2018The Power of Music\u2019: A Painting by William Sidney Mount\u201d (The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art<\/em> 79, no. 2 (1992): 38\u201362), offers another viewpoint.\r\n\u00a0<\/em>The essence of the minstrel show was the ludicrous spectacle of whites imitating blacks. The stereotypes were usually scurrilous; blacks were stupid, vainglorious, naive, ugly. The format was irregular, consisting of patter songs, skits, ballads: whatever seemed apposite and likely to get a laugh. But the humor was not aimed at blacks so much as the white elites who lorded it above the white working- and middle-class audiences. It was the spectacle of blacks mimicking their ultimate superiors (their aristocratic Whig allies) that proved so funny, because it mortified the latter's pretensions.<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6224\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, <\/cite> 1859. Oil on linen. 91.4 x 114.9 cm. New York Historical Society, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nEastman Johnson, a Northern artist whose father was a state official, depicted pre-Civil War black Southern life in a sentimental light. Negro Life at the South <\/em>takes the deprived life of enslaved people and renders it picturesque. Later, his works would contribute to the general, gradual transformation of the public image of black people following the Civil War.\r\n\r\nNegro Life at the South<\/em> was painted at a critical moment in the debate about slavery, and its impact was significant.\r\n\r\nIn 1867, Henry Tuckerman, in his Book of the Artists<\/em> (New York: G. P. Putnam & Son, 1867, 467-70), said of Eastman Johnson that \u201cNo one of our painters has more truly caught and perfectly delineated American rustic and negro, or with such pathetic and natural emphasis put upon canvas bits of household or childish life, or given such bright and real glimpses of primitive human nature. . .\u00a0 In all his works we find vital expression, . . . [I]nvariably characteristic; trained in the technicalities of his art, keen in his observation, and natural in his feeling, we have a genre painter in Eastman Johnson who has elevated and widened its naturalistic scope and its national significance. His pictures are in constant demand, and purchased before they leave the easel. All American collectors seek and prize them.\u201d\r\n\r\nTuckerman's attitude reflected a Northern elitism in keeping with Johnson's paternalistic attitude, a form of liberalism couched in sympathetic feeling for social groups unable to defend their cause.\r\n\r\nNegro Life at the South<\/em> was exhibited at the National Academy of Design spring exhibition in 1859. The figures were inhabitants of the block his father owned on F Street. The worn-down house was situated in the interior yard of what used to be an old tavern east of the family home in Washington, D.C. The ramshackle state of the dwelling is emphasized by the deteriorating wood, loose clapboards, and broken windows, and it evokes a picture of dismal living conditions.\r\n\r\nVarious figures surround the central banjo player: a mother and her children, kids at play, self-absorbed lovers, and, looking down from a window, a turbaned woman and her baby. Two young girls look on from the sidelines as an elegant white woman (Johnson's sister), and her companion emerge from the big house next door to watch.\r\n\r\nThe painting's instant success was aided by its equivocal approach to the subject of slavery. Abolitionists in the North interpreted the scene as depicting the appalling living conditions of Southern slaves. In contrast, Southern slave owners argued that it demonstrated how the enslaved in the south were happy, despite their \"uncomfortable\" living conditions.\r\n\r\nThe most direct and distressing contradiction to this phoney belief came from a former enslaved black man named John Little. In A People's History of the United <\/em>States,1492-Present<\/em> (Harper and Row, 1980), Howard Zinn includes an excerpt from an interview with Little: \u201cThey say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in a day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains\u2026.We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhile Johnson's scene speaks to the stereotype of the ever-cheerful black person, approaching somewhat the notion of many Southerners that \u201cNegroes\u201d could find happiness and fulfilment only when in service to a white master, it also addresses abolitionists' concerns by showing crumbling and decaying architecture as signifiers of the crisis of slavery.\r\n\r\nJohn Davis writes in \u201cEastman Johnson\u2019s Negro Life at the South<\/em> and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C.\u201d (Art Bulletin<\/em> 80, no. 1 (1998): 67\u201392):\r\nThe great success of the painting at the time of its debut in New York has usually been ascribed to its ability to be all things to all people. For abolitionists, the decrepit, tumbledown living conditions pictured by Johnson matched the moral degeneracy of the institution of slavery, while for slavery's defenders, the careless leisure-time activities of several generations of slaves provided visual proof that forced servitude was neither physically onerous nor destructive of family life\u2026 The main question, at least indirectly, has centered on intentionality: Did Eastman Johnson create Negro Life at the South<\/em> as an indictment of Southern slavery, or was it intended as a sop to apologists of the peculiar institution? Or, perhaps was it simply a shrewdly constructed document of judicious neutrality?\r\n\r\nAbove all, Negro Life at the South<\/em> was commended for the distinct types it catalogued visually, for its seeming \"truthfulness of expression,\u201d reality of character,\" and \"honesty of painting,\" in the words of the Evening Post<\/em>. To identify these types, critics resorted to the language of minstrelsy and popular literature, particularly Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin<\/em> (1851).<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6225\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]
<\/a> Stephen Foster, \u201cMy Old Kentucky Home\u201d (Baltimore: Thomas G. Doyle, 1853). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\nThe most enduring popular association, however, was with Stephen Foster's sentimental minstrel song \"My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!\" (1853), a mournful tune with overtones of impending death and longing for an earlier, uncomplicated time when slaves supposedly lived untroubled existences in idyllic rural landscapes.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u2026\r\n\r\nAlthough records in succeeding decades were kept less carefully, petitions against Washington slavery continued unabated through the 1850s, up to the time of the unveiling of Negro Life at the South<\/em> and, subsequently, the outbreak of the Civil War. Abolitionist newspapers helped by fanning the flames of public outrage: William Lloyd Garrison's Boston Liberator<\/em> lamented, for example, \"The District is rotten with the plague, and stinks in the nostrils of the world.\"<\/blockquote>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6226\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]
<\/a> American Anti-Slavery Society, \u201cSlave Market of America\u201d (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836). View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nBroadsides, such as Slave Market of America<\/em>, with maps, illustrations, and descriptions of district slave prisons in what it termed \"The Home of the Oppressed,\" were also distributed as part of the campaign.\r\n9.5\r\n| Civil War<\/h1>\r\nThe Civil War in the United States broke out in 1861 after decades of tensions between Northern and Southern states. A central issue was the abolition of slavery. The government's prohibition of enslavement led the deep South to secede and form the Confederate States of America, which the incoming Lincoln administration and Northern states refused to recognize as legitimate.\r\n\r\nAfrican American men were officially allowed to enlist in the Union army following the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In the Northern states, black people were now regarded in a new and different light\u2014their fight for freedom equated with Western Europeans' release from feudal dominion\u2014and they were actively recruited to serve in the army.\r\n\r\nAmerican artists wrestled with representing a war that had fractured a country\u2019s nascent identity, and their response was diverse stylistically and ideologically. Images of enslaved people and former slaves that bracket the Civil War are conspicuous in their differences. In terms of painting, the predominant subjects fell into the categories of landscape and genre, with the former assuming a metaphoric dimension and the latter modulating everyday scenes to look at a changing social order where former enslaved Americans negotiated for a life in freedom.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_6229\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"800\"]
<\/a> Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty - The Fugitive Slaves, <\/cite>ca. 1862. Oil on paper board. 55.8 x 66.4 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York. View Source<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe theme of the runaway slave was popular during this period, affording a visible contradiction to Southern propaganda that enslaved people did not seek change. It also carried New Testament parallels in allusions to Mary, Joseph and Jesus fleeing to Egypt.\r\n\r\nOnly a few weeks into the war, in May 1861, three enslaved African American men escaped Confederate territory and sought refuge at the Union\u2019s Fort Monroe. The fort\u2019s commander, General Benjamin Butler, refused to return them to the Confederate officer who legally owned them, declaring they were a \u201ccontraband of war.\u201d His stance was codified by the First Confiscation Act, which invalidated the claims of enslavers to escaped enslaved people who had been used on behalf of the Confederacy. Thousands of fugitives escaped slavery at significant risk by fleeing to Union lines, and many became involved in the Union war effort.\r\n\r\nJohnson's Ride for Liberty: The Fugitive Slaves <\/em>encapsulates the transformation from passivity to intentionality as a black family ride to freedom. The painting is autobiographical, recalling an event Johnson witnessed near Bull Run in Virginia in March 1862. An inscription on the back of the image describes the event: \u201cA veritable incident \/ in the civil war seen by \/ myself at Centerville \/ on this morning of \/ McClellan\u2019s advance towards Manassas March 2, 1862 \/ Eastman Johnson.\u201d \u00a0While Johnson painted three versions of this event, he never displayed any. Two are in public museums; the location of the third is unknown.\u00a0 Did the incident captured in