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Robert S. Duncanson: City and Hinterland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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Robert Scott Duncanson, who lived and worked primarily in Cincinnati, Ohio, but also in Michigan, Canada, and Europe, was one of only a few known African-American landscape painters in the 19th century, and one of even fewer to gain a regional, national, and international reputation. His Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River (1851) is painted in a style typical of the Hudson River school: a panoramic view of a quiet and apparently pristine wilderness, known then as a popular beauty spot near Cincinnati (Figure 1). The dense forest that encloses the pool, with broken timber around the edges and two drowned branches projecting above the surface of the water, implies isolation and ruggedness. The small, slightly ragged youths fishing in the foreground, though, are more than generic props; they are an image of the desired effect of nature on the often socially mixed residents of the river bottoms, and of Cincinnati in general. The rustic fisherman absorbed and at ease amid a rugged Western landscape loses himself in nature, but instead of making him wild, the experience refines as it acts “But to bind him to his native mountains more.” The image of the two men – as, for example, opposed to figures of genteel tourists – embedded in their native lakes and forests offered reassurance and evidence to local boosters of the positive impact of nature. Nature, in this concept, exerted a softening, soothing influence on those who experienced it, akin to women's moral influence on those within the domestic sphere.
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References
NOTES
1. Recent scholarship on Duncanson includes Lubin, David, Picturing a Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Ketner, Joseph, Emergence of the African-American Artist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993)Google Scholar; McElroy, Guy, Robert S. Duncanson: A Centennial Exhibition (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1972)Google Scholar; Driskell, David, Two Centuries of Black American Art (New York: Knopf, 1976)Google Scholar; Parks, James, Robert S. Duncanson, 19th Century Black Romantic Painter (Washington, D.C.: Associated, 1980)Google Scholar; Robert S. Duncanson: A British—American Connection (Durham: North Carolina Central University Museum of Art, 1984)Google Scholar; Hartigan, Lynda, Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Pringle, Allan, “Robert Duncanson in Montreal,” American Art Journal 17, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 28–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bearden, Romare and Henderson, Harry, A History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993)Google Scholar.
2. Moore's Western Lady's Book 13, no. 3 (March 1856): back inside cover.
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8. Cincinnati's reformers and landowners sponsored numerous associations and activities designed to develop a taste for cultivated nature and thereby improve fellow citizens. During the antebellum period, Spring Grove Cemetery, where many of the elite were buried, became a model of the garden cemetery movement, and Charles Stetson, founder of the Western Art Union, as well as collector Robert Buchanan, participated on its board (“The Decoration of Rural Cemeteries,” Cincinnatus 3, no. 2 [02 1858]: 67Google Scholar). See also similar sentiments in the “Address delivered at the Consecration of the Spring Grove Cemetery, near Cincinnati, August 20th, 1845, by the Hon. John McLean,” Western Review 1, no. 1 (1846): 158–64Google Scholar. Agricultural societies, though primarily encouraging scientific farming, shared the rhetoric of other urban associations: “Agricultural societies are civilizing engines, linking communities,” and their fairs, like those of the mechanics, inculcate a “community of interest” (“Associated Effort — Agricultural Fairs,” Cincinnatus 2, no. 9 [09 1857]: 406–7Google Scholar). See also Thornton, Tamara, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life Among the Boston Elite, 1785–1860 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], 58–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
9. Cincinnati institutions that exhibited art included the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts, the Western Museum, the Ohio Mechanics Institute, the Young Men's Mercantile Library Association, the Firemen's Fund, the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, Ball's Daguerrean Gallery, Faris' Daguerrean Gallery, the Western Art Union, the Cosmopolitan Art Association (Sandusky, Ohio), Western Association for the Encouragement of Manufacture and the Arts, the Shakespeare Gallery, Wiswell's Gallery, Cincinnati Gallery of Fine Arts, Cincinnati Athenaeum and Society of Literary and Educational Discussion, the Cincinnati Sketch Club, and the Cincinnati Drawing and Painting Academy. Private patrons like Longworth, George Schoenberger, and Judge Jacob Burnet also occasionally opened their homes to visitors. Longworth provided some degree or offer of support to Hiram Powers, James Beard, Thomas B. Read, Lilly Martin Spencer, William H. Powell, and Robert Duncanson. All of the aforementioned institutions received innumerable newspaper notices, as did individual artists. Duncanson, for example, from 1843 to 1872 received at least 112 newspaper mentions in just the leading Cincinnati papers.
10. According to John Reps's comprehensive survey of 19th-century townscapes, antebellum city lithographs, a commercial venture supported by land speculators, town promoters, and civic leaders to attract people and industry, featured a moderately elevated viewpoint, with some inclusion of a foreground and figures, to overlook ordinary roofs to see the streets, the prime indicators of a town's orderly expansion (Views and Viewmakers of Urban America [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984], 17–30Google Scholar; see also his Cities of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994]Google Scholar). Hales, Peter, in Silver Cities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, also discusses some of these conventions in relationship to photographic panoramas. Caroline Arscott, Griselda Pollock, and Janet Wolff analyze town views in their role of forming attitudes and ideas about cities (“The Partial View: the Visual Representation of the Early Nineteenth-Century City,” in The Culture of Capital, ed. Wolff, Janet and Seed, John [New York: Manchester University Press, 1988], 191–221Google Scholar). Boime, Albert's Magisterial Gaze (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)Google Scholar links the viewpoint of city views to the ideology of national expansion and, for Duncanson, to progressive emancipation of African Americans (123).
11. An early view of Cincinnati in 1802 (woodcut, Cincinnati Public Library) established this viewing position and was followed by a series commissioned by Nicholas Longworth from J. C. Wild in 1835 (see Niblack, Rita, “Nicholas Long-worth, Art Patron of Cincinnati” [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1985], 104–5Google Scholar). Views of the city, published in magazines (like Genius of the West) or as engravings and lithographs multiplied into the dozens in the next decades. Of them, a few adopted the alternate viewpoint from one of the hills behind the city, such as Mount Adams, which emphasized the canals and factories rather than the port; see the Family Magazine frontispiece in 1841 or well-known lithographer Hill, J. W.'s View of Cincinnati (New York: Smith, 1852)Google Scholar. On the city's business's southern orientation, see Abbott (Boosters and Businessmen) and Shilling, David (“The Relation of Southern Ohio to the South During the Decade Preceding the Civil War,” Quarterly Publication of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 8, no. 1 [01–03 1913]: 3–27)Google Scholar, as well as publications by boosters like Charles Cist or Drake, 's “Natural Ties” (352–53)Google Scholar.
12. Some of the travelers who made the hike up a neighboring hill or took the ferry across the river to experience the view include Walker, Timothy, Annual Discourse of the Ohio Historical and Philosophical Society (Cincinnati: A. Flash, 1838), 20Google Scholar; Drake, Benjamin, Tales and Sketches from the Queen City (Cincinnati: E. Morgan, 1838), 140Google Scholar; Chevalier, Michel, Society, Manners and Politics in the United States (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1839), 195Google Scholar; Hall, Frederick, Letters from the East and from the West (Washington City: F. Taylor and William M. Morrison, 1840), 65, 70Google Scholar; and Heilbron, Bertha, ed., With Pen and Pencil on the Frontier in 1851: Diary and Sketches of Frank Blackwell Mayer (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986), 46Google Scholar.
13. Rose of the Valley: Flower of the West 1, no. 1 (January 1839): frontispiece.
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19. Curry, , Free Blacks, 194, 210Google Scholar. See also Trotter, Joe, River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998)Google Scholar.
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21. Besides the Cary family, Ketner mentions the LaBoiteaux family (Emergence, 14). Living in a countryseat in nearby Mount Pleasant, Albert Hussey, active in women's education, abolition, and temperance, later commissioned (along with the other directors of the Cliff Mine) a mining picture from Duncanson. In a letter to Junius Sloan, Duncanson writes that he has completed “a view of Robt Bucanos place in Clifton,” another suburb; Bucano may refer to Robert Buchanan (August 21, 1854, letter, copy in National Museum of American Art file on Duncanson).
22. Ketner, , Emergence, 17Google Scholar. The Cincinnati Art Museum file records the owner of Mt. Healthy as Frank Wright.
23. The Stowes lived in Walnut Hill, art patron George Schoenberger on Bellevue, the educators and abolitionist Carys on Mount Pleasant, and the McGuffeys and writer and booster James Hall on the Little Miami. Despite his agricultural ventures, Nicholas Longworth never left Belmont, his town house, though his son Joseph, an art patron himself, moved to the suburbs in the 1840s. The most famous countryseat in Cincinnati was William H. Harrison's at North Bend, where Mrs. Harrison, a botanist, experimented with landscaping the grounds. Visible to steamboats, Harrison's nearby tomb and the house were Cincinnati landmarks and appeared in engravings.
24. Tuttle, Elisabeth makes the argument that countryseats are an extension of the city into nature as well as a symbol of progress in “Country Seats, the City and the Idea of Progress: Cincinnati in the Early Nineteenth Century” (Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1990)Google Scholar.
25. “Observations on the Decoration of Rural Cemeteries,” Cincinnatus 3, no. 3 (03 1858): 116–18Google Scholar; continued from 3, no. 2 (February 1858): 65–68.
26. “Lawns,” Cincinnatus 3, no. 8 (08 1858): 351Google Scholar. Farmers' College in College Hill, run by Cincinnatus editor (and Duncanson patrons) Freeman Cary and his father William, tried to detach farming from a purely manual occupation and associate it instead with science and the liberal arts. William and Freeman Cary advocated abolition and female education (establishing a nearby women's college), and daughters Phoebe and Alice Cary contributed poems to local and national publications. Like William Gallagher, local poet and editor of the Western Quarterly Review, Cary poems often celebrated regional nature (Gallagher, 's Miami Woods [Cincinnati: R. Clark, 1881Google Scholar; orig. pub. before 1849], and Cary, Alice's Clovernook, or Recollections of our Neighborhood in the West [New York: Redfield, 1852]Google Scholar and Pictures of Country Life [New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859])Google Scholar.
27. von Loher, Franz, “The Landscape and People of Cincinnati, 1846–47,” trans. Frederic Trautmann, in Ethnic Diversity and Civic Identity, ed. Shapiro, Henry and Sarna, Jonathan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 39–45Google Scholar.
28. “Embellishments of a Country Home,” Cincinnatus 3, no. 6 (06 1858): 261–62Google Scholar.
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30. Daniel Aaron cites a dialogue published in a Cincinnati newspaper, in which a young lady visiting the city is asked whether she's yet been to Longworth's garden (Cincinnati, Queen City of the West [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992], 267Google Scholar). Clara Longworth de Chambrun tells a story of a visiting Lincoln mistaking Longworth for his gardener (quoted in Schwartz, Abby, Nicholas Longworth: Art Patron of Cincinnati [Cincinnati: Taft Museum, 1988], n.p.Google Scholar).
31. Longworth reinforced this public presentation with pamphlets on horticulture and agriculture. A lithograph (published the same year as Duncanson's portrait) titled Mr. Longworth — Esquire of Cincinnati and the Vineyards of Ohio 1858 (Harper's Weekly 2, no. 82 [07 24, 1858]: 472–74Google Scholar) features a full-length portrait (from a photograph) by “Porter of Cincinnati” above a view of Belmont (home to his garden and the Duncanson murals) as well as pictures of the stages of wine making. The lithograph mentions Longworth's 4½ acres of garden as well as his interest in local parks and various eccentricities, including keeping papers and notes in his hat and pinned to his sleeve, as shown in Duncanson's portrait. The author describes Longworth's character as a “fine old American gentleman — self-made, self-informed and self-directed.” He could have added self-cultivated.
32. Martineau, Harriet, Retrospect of Western Travel (New York: Charles Lohman, 1838), 47Google Scholar.
33. Semi-Colon Club Papers, Cincinnati Historical Society. The papers of the Semi-Colon Club (1829–46) drew contributions primarily from the New England contingent in Cincinnati. The Semi-Colon Club's fortnightly meetings rotated between the houses of John Foote, Charles Stetson, and William Greene, who, like the ministers, lawyers, doctors, teachers and editors who attended, were generally Unitarian or Presbyterian Whigs and Western boosters. Members (by invitation) included Benjamin Drake, the son of Daniel Drake, the Beecher family and Calvin Stowe, author and jurist James Hall, editor Edward Mansfield, First Congregational minister Ephraim Peabody, editor James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, James H. Perkins, Caroline Hentz, and Isaac A. Jewett. The papers that survive, mostly anonymous, except for ones later published elsewhere, are short, gentle satires — crowded canal boats, fashionable balls, the perfection of the age, Jacksonians as hogs — or utopian essays about domestic subjects — home, babe on knee, flowers, fisherman. The debunking tone of the humorous essays deflates the moralizing message; in the more serious compositions, the relatively prosaic subject matter punctures high sentiment. See also The Semi-Colon 1, no. 1–2 (January-February 1845); Cincinnati Public Library Rare Books.
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35. Hales, argues for this function of photo galleries in Silver Cities (20)Google Scholar.
36. Alan Trachtenberg discusses the decoration of daguerreotype reception rooms, which he describes as a theater for creating a social image (Reading American Photographs [New York: Hill and Wang, 1989], 40–43Google Scholar). Bearden and Henderson count 37 daguerreotype studios in Cincinnati in 1851 (History of African-American Artists, 25). Ball's major competition for fine art daguerreotyping, Thomas Faris, also exhibited oil paintings in his Melodeon Gallery, including Duncanson paintings.
37. Shirley Wajda thoroughly analyzes the function and decoration of the daguerrean gallery, including Ball's, arguing that the reception parlor designated the aspirations and concomitant behaviors of both operators and patrons, in “The Commercial Photographic Parlor, 1839–1889,” in Shaping Communities: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture VI, ed. Hudgins, Carter and Cromley, Elizabeth Collins (Nashville: Tennessee University Press, 1997), 216–30Google Scholar.
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40. Willis, reproduces the pamphlet accompanying the lost Panorama (James Ball, 290 ff.)Google Scholar.
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57. Ibid. Calvin Starbuck, the author of the entries, was editor of the Cincinnati Times Star.
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