Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era 9780271088228

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CONTRABAND GUIDES

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C O NTR AB AN D GU I DES Race, Transatlantic

Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era

paul h. d. kaplan

t he pennsy lvania stat e univ ersit y pr e ss

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University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chapter 2 was originally published in Blacks and Blackness in European Art

of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Adrienne Childs and Susan Libby (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 69–104. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kaplan, Paul H. D. (Paul Henry Daniel), 1952– author.

Title: Contraband guides : race, transatlantic culture, and the arts in the Civil War era / Paul H. D. Kaplan.

Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State

University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: “Explores the theme of race in nineteenth-century transatlantic culture, focusing on how American concepts of race were intertwined

with the ongoing cultural exchanges that Americans had with European artistic traditions”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019048015 | ISBN 9780271083858 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans in art—History—19th century. |

Blacks in art—History—19th century. | Art, American—19th century. |

African American art—19th century. | African American art—European influences. | Art and race—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC N8232.K365 2020 | DDC 704.03/96073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048015 Copyright © 2020 Paul H. D. Kaplan All rights reserved Printed in Turkey

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements

of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

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c ont ent s l i st of il l u st rat ion s ac know l ed g m en t s Introduction

vii

xi

1

1

Representations of People of Color in Nineteenth-Century American Accounts of Italian Travel 11

2

“A Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans” Eugène Warburg in Europe, 1853–1859 31

3

“The Black Man To-day Means Liberty” African American Figures in the Work of Emanuel Leutze 91

4

“Something American” Art and Slavery in the Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton 165

5

Old Masters The Western Tradition of the Visual Arts in African American Culture in the Civil War Era 181

6

Contraband Guide Mark Twain on Race and the Renaissance no t e s

225

bi bl io g raphy i n dex

207

257

281 v

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il l u st rat ion s 18.

Uncle Tom and Little Eva, ca. 1852

19.

Cecilia Boyle (Evelyn Vere Crombie Boyle?), “The quick fancy of Nina’s auditors made reality of the story as it went along,” ca. 1856–65 52

20.

African Magus from the Adoration of the Magi, 1500, restored 1750s (fig. 5) 13

J. C. d’Arnoud Gerkens, Nina Reading to Tiff and the Children, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred (Haarlem: Kruseman, Van Druten & Bleeker, 1857), vol. 2, frontispiece 54

21.

7.

Giacinto Gimignani, Adoration of the Magi, 1624–35 17

Josiah Wedgwood (workshop: William Hackwood), Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 1787 56

8.

Baldassare Longhena, Juste Le Court, and Melchior Barthel, tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1669 18

22.

Victor van Hove, Black Slave After a Beating, 1855

23.

9.

Africans from Baldassare Longhena, Juste Le Court, and Melchior Barthel, tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1669 (fig. 8) 18

Louis Simon Boizot, Moi égale à toi, moi libre aussi, 1793–94 58

24.

Hiram Powers, Greek Slave, 1844 version

25.

Overseer/Eagle and Four Slaves, from “America in Crystal,” Punch 20 (May 24, 1851): 209 60

26.

John Tenniel, The Virginian Slave, from Punch 20 ( June 7, 1851): 236 61

27.

John Absolon, Greek Slave at the Great Exhibition, 1851 62

28.

John Bell, A Daughter of Eve / The American Slave, 1853 64

29.

John Bell, Andromeda (on display at the Crystal Palace, 1851), 1850 65

30.

John Bell, Octoroon, 1868

31.

Charles Cumberworth, Marie / Negro Woman at the Fountain, 1846 67

32.

Milly, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred (Paris: De Bry, 1859), 16 69

1.

Northern Coat of Arms, 1864

2

2.

Arms of Haiti, from James Redpath, ed., Guide to Hayti (Boston: Haytian Bureau of Emigration, 1861), title page 2

3.

Albrecht Dürer, Dürer’s Coat of Arms, 1523

4.

Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867

5.

Adoration of the Magi, 1500, restored 1750s

6.

3

8 13

10.

True Williams, Tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1869 20

11.

Melchior Barthel, Bust of an African, ca. 1660

12.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Rio de la Plata, from the Fountain of the Four Rivers, Piazza Navona, Rome, 1648–51 25

13.

Eugène Warburg, marble floor, St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, ca. 1850 34

14.

Bertel Thorvaldsen, Ganymede and the Eagle, 1817–29 35

15.

Eugène Warburg, John Young Mason, 1855

16.

Eugène Warburg, Uncle Tiff, 1856

17.

Eugène Warburg, Uncle Tiff, 1856 (fig. 16), detail

22

40

47 47

50

57

59

66

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33.

William Wetmore Story, Libyan Sibyl, 1860–61

70

34.

Robert S. Duncanson, Uncle Tom and Little Eva, 1853 72

35.

Joseph Durham, Africa, from the monument to the Great Exhibition of 1851, 1858 77

36.

Benjamin Evans Spence, The Finding of Moses, 1862, detail 78

37.

J. H. Baker, The Infant Moses, after Benjamin Evans Spence, The Finding of Moses, from Art Journal, n.s., 3 (March 1864): 70 79

38.

Book cover from Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (London: G. Routledge, 1857) 81

39.

Mary Webb Performing at Stafford House, from The Illustrated London News, August 2, 1856, 122 83

Noël Le Mire, Conclusion de la campagne de 1781 en Virginie, le Marquis de la Fayette, after Louis Le Paon, The Marquis de Lafayette with a Black Military Servant, 1783 103

53.

Washington Treading on a British Flag, ca. 1790

54.

Expedition at Sea, from the Cántigas of Alfonso the Wise, ca. 1280–84 105

55.

Enslaved black African from Pietro Tacca, Monument of the Four Moors, 1626 106

56.

Vittore Carpaccio, Miracle of the True Cross, 1494, detail of gondolier 107

57.

Emanuel Leutze, Titian on the Lagoons, 1857

58.

George Morland, Angling Party, 1789

59.

James Clonney, Fishing Party on Long Island Sound, 1847 110

60.

Benjamin Latrobe, Four Ferrymen of the Susquehanna, 1798 110

61.

Théodore Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19

62.

The Death of Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre, from William Cooper Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: R. F. Walcutt, 1855), frontispiece 113

63.

William Ranney, Marion Crossing the Pee Dee, 1850 115

64.

William Powell, The Battle of Lake Erie, 1857–65

65.

George Caleb Bingham, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1856–71 119

66.

George Caleb Bingham, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1856–71 (fig. 65), detail 120

67.

George Caleb Bingham, Flatboatmen in Port, 1857

68.

Carl Wimar, Flatboatmen, 1854

104

108

109

40.

John Rogers, The Slave Auction, 1859

41.

William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, 1858–60

42.

G. B. Foggini, Leopoldo de’ Medici, ca. 1680

43.

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 92

44.

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 (fig. 43), detail 94

45.

Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819

46.

Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819 (fig. 45), detail of right side 97

47.

Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819 (fig. 45), detail of left side 97

48.

Edward Hicks, Washington at the Delaware, after Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, ca. 1849 98

49.

John Trumbull, General George Washington with a Black Military Servant, 1780 100

50.

Noël Le Mire, Le général Washington, after Louis Le Paon, General George Washington with a Black Military Servant, 1780 101

69.

Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Fugitives in Flight, 1869 123

70.

Emanuel Leutze, Washington as Surveyor, 1852

Godfrey Kneller, Sir Thomas Lucy and an Enslaved Groom, 1680 102

71.

Emanuel Leutze, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields, 1852 125

51.

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84

52.

85 87

96

111

117

121

122

124

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72.

Emanuel Leutze, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields, 1852 (fig. 71), detail of boy 126

90.

Thomas Rossiter and Louis Rémy Mignot, Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784, 1859 151

73.

Emanuel Leutze, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields, 1852 (fig. 71), detail of background 126

91.

74.

Nicolas Lancret, Escaped Bird, ca. 1730–36

Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis, after 1875 (artist’s copy after a lost original of 1865–66) 151

75.

Henry Kirke Brown, The Erie Canal, from his tomb of DeWitt Clinton, 1853 129

92.

Frank Buchser, American Blacklegs, 1866

93.

Emanuel Leutze, General Ambrose Burnside, 1863

76.

Constantino Brumidi, The Surrender of Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown, 1857 131

94.

77.

Thomas Crawford, Freedom, 1855–57, erected 1862–63 132

The Union League Club Presenting Banners to the 20th New York Regiment, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 26, 1864, 4 155

95.

Emanuel Leutze, The Angel of the Battlefield, 1864

78.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861 134

96.

Theodor Kaufmann, On to Liberty, 1867

79.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 135

97.

Emanuel Leutze, Abraham Lincoln Delivering His Second Inaugural Address, 1865 158

80.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861 136

98.

Emanuel Leutze, Abraham Lincoln Delivering His Second Inaugural Address, 1865 (fig. 97), detail of crowd 159

81.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of group with African American youth 137

99.

Thomas Ball, Lincoln Monument, 1876

82.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of African American youth 138

83.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of “john hay inve” inscription 139

127

84.

Franky Magniadas, Lincoln medal, 1866, reverse

85.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of eagle in the border 144

86.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of Magi in the border 145

87.

Adoration of the Magi, 1630

88.

Giotto, Flight into Egypt, 1304–6

89.

John Quincy Adams Ward, Freedman, 1863

146 149 150

141

152

156

157

161

100. Gustav Eilers after Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Reformation (1862), 1868 162 101. John Ruskin, The Queen of Sheba’s Black Maidservant, after Paolo Veronese and workshop, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1858 166 102. Paolo Veronese and workshop, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, ca. 1580 167 103. Paolo Veronese and workshop, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, ca. 1580 (fig. 102), detail of group with African figure 167 104. J. M. W. Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On (The Slave Ship), 1840 168 105. John Ruskin after Jacopo Tintoretto, Adoration of the Magi, 1845 169 106. Workshop of Bonifazio de’ Pitati, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1556 171 107. Paolo Veronese, Marriage at Cana, 1562–63, detail of left side 172

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153

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108. Samuel F. B. Morse, The Salon Carré at the Louvre, 1831–33 173

115. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Shaw Memorial, 1897

109. Paolo Veronese, Marriage at Cana, 1562–63, detail of right side 174

117. Jacopo Tintoretto, Miracle of the Slave, 1548 (fig. 116), detail 204

110. Ancient Feast, ca. 1863, detail

177

111. Diana of Ephesus, second century c.e. 184 112. “The First Exhibition of the Anglo-African Institute for the Encouragement of Industry and Art,” advertisement in the Anglo-African, January 3, 1863, 4 194 113. Jan Gossaert (Mabuse), Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1506–16 199 114. Jan Gossaert (Mabuse), Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1506–16 (fig. 113), detail 200

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116. Jacopo Tintoretto, Miracle of the Slave, 1548

202

203

118. Frank Buchser, Art Student or Rising Taste, 1869

208

119. Frank Buchser, Bootblacks Playing Marbles, 1867

209

120. Photograph of Sallie Mercer, 1860s

213

121. Saint Zeno, twelfth century c.e. 215 122. Winslow Homer, The Bright Side, 1865

220

123. Harriet Hosmer, photograph of the first design in plaster for Freedman’s Memorial, 1865–66 222 124. Francesco Pezzicar, Emancipation, 1873

223

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ac k now l e d g me n t s Many people and institutions have been invaluable in helping me to conceptualize and assemble this book. I want first to thank my wife, Beth Sutherland, for her help and constant crucial feedback throughout the project. I am also grateful to other family members: my son, Dan (especially for his technical advice); my sister and brother-in-law, Cora Kaplan and Dave Glover; and my mother-in-law, Betsy Sutherland. Deep thanks are due to the Hutchins Center at Harvard University and its director, Henry Louis Gates Jr., for various forms of essential support, and among the staff there I want to single out Sheldon Cheek and Karen Dalton, at the Image of the Black in Western Art photo archive, and also Krishna Lewis, Tom Wolejko, and Abby Wolf. At my home institution, Purchase College, SUNY, I am grateful to Barry Pearson for the support he kindly made available. Barbara Wolanin and Jennifer Blancato, at the Office of the Curator of the Architect of the Capitol, were especially generous in their assistance, and I also want to thank the staffs at New York Public Library (both the 42nd Street Research Library and the Schomburg Collection), the library of the New-York Historical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Houghton Library at Harvard, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Newspaper Reading Room at the Library of Congress, and the Historic New Orleans Collection. Ray Palmer, in providing access to Eugène Warburg’s Parian statue Uncle Tiff, a key work, made

a major contribution to this project, and I also deeply appreciate his research help and his willingness to ask me hard questions. Many colleagues and friends generously helped with particular research questions and in thinking through the project: Susan Ashbrook, David Bindman, Fritz Casselman, Tess Chakalakkal, Jules Chametzky, Peter Chametzky, Adrienne Childs, Melissa Dabakis, Don Doyle, Miles Hall, Patricia Hills, Heidrun Irre, Fabien Lacouture, Stephanie Lane, Doranne and François Lecercle, Elise Lemire, Michael Lobel, Esther Schreuder, Tanya Sheehan, and Paul Wright. For helping with access to objects and reproductions, my thanks go to Robert Bain, Kent Book, Beth Burgess (at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Study Center), Daniel Harkett, Steven Hillyer, Karen Lemmey, Alex Mann, Karen Sherry, Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, Roslyn Waddy, and Christopher Williams. At Penn State University Press, I am grateful to Eleanor Goodman for all her help and support and to Keith Monley for his learned and meticulous editing. Jochen Wierich and Patricia Hills, who served as readers of the manuscript for the press, made excellent suggestions, which I took to heart. I dedicate this book to my parents, Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan. The volume is a homage to their indefatigable research on African American history and iconography; I wish they were still here both to enjoy and to critique it.

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Introduction

I

n 1864, d ur i ng t he hard-fought American presidential election campaign between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan, a Boston publisher issued a lithographic political cartoon entitled Northern Coat of Arms (fig. 1).1 The print shows a pair of bare, dark-skinned, splayed, flat, and hard-used feet that surreally support only a huge, softly peaked cap ornamented with the word “liberty,” a group of stars, and the American eagle. This form of headgear dates back to classical Greece, when it was known as a Phrygian cap. In the ancient Roman world a similar hat, known as a pileus, signified that its wearer was either born free or had been manumitted, and by the time of the American and French Revolutions, the two forms of cap had merged in the popular imagination and were both worn by revolutionaries and displayed as revolutionary emblems; the term “liberty cap” also came into use.2 The liberty cap was used in American revolutionary imagery, and already in 1792 one of the earliest and grandest American paintings with an antislavery theme, Samuel Jennings’s Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences (Library Company of Philadelphia), included the cap as an emblem, though it is not worn by an African American.3 By 1807 it began to appear atop a palm tree on the official coat of arms (and often the flag) of the

newly independent Haiti (fig. 2).4 In the later 1850s it became the focus of a bitter artistic dispute concerning a monumental sculpture intended to crown the new dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.: Jefferson Davis, then secretary of the interior but already a strong defender of slavery, forced the sculptor Thomas Crawford (working in Rome) to remove the cap from his allegorical female figure of Liberty for fear of having it read as an antislavery emblem.5 (This work, without the liberty cap [see fig. 77], was not finally installed until 1863, by which time Davis had become president of the Confederacy.) Though an abolitionist might, for a moment, have read the Northern Coat of Arms as a celebration of the many thousands of African Americans who had walked their way to freedom both before and during the Civil War, the ungainly nature of the feet and the suppression of the rest of the black body make the print an unmistakable and virulently racist attack on African Americans, emancipation, and Lincoln. Its disruptive mission is further evident in the punning contradiction between the “arms” of its inscribed title and the image’s exclusive focus on legs and feet. The long, projecting heels also match a common feature of the stereotypical black body in nineteenth-century caricature and

1

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f ig ur e 1 Northern Coat of Arms, 1864. Lithograph, 28.5 × 23.4 cm. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

f ig ur e 2 Arms of Haiti, from James Redpath, ed., Guide to Hayti (Boston: Haytian Bureau of Emigration, 1861), title page. Photo: author.

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racial ethnology.6 The print does call to mind the vast distances traversed by often-barefoot fugitives (usually called contrabands) fleeing Southern slavery and heading for the Union lines and the North during the Civil War, but it shows no sympathy to them and instead monstrously reduces them to a single pair of appendages. This image appeared at the same time that Lincoln and his Republican Party were being accused of advancing an agenda of miscegenation (race mixing).7 It is also likely that the anonymous artist expected some of the consumers of the image to be familiar with the inclusion of the cap on the national emblem of Haiti, as if to accuse the Lincoln administration of emulating that black republic. But the creator of the cartoon also relied on his audience’s familiarity with the conspicuous presence of dark-skinned Africans in the traditions of European heraldry, stretching back to the later Middle Ages and, in the 1860s, still ubiquitous among the aristocratic families of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy and in the official devices of European cities and regions.8 Those traditional emblems were not, of course, satirical, and only rarely were they created explicitly to celebrate the oppression of people of color.9 In the realm of fine arts, the most famous coat of arms with an African was the German Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer’s personal device (fig. 3).10 In this widely disseminated woodcut, the bust of an African in profile appears above the shield and helm, in the zone known as the crest, and the figure in fact wears a Phrygian cap. Without some consciousness of this kind of long-standing European imagery, the parodic Northern Coat of Arms would have had far less bite.11 One of the essential themes in this book is, then, that without a comprehensive understanding of their European (both British and Continental) sources, the meanings of many American images of people of color in the Civil War era would be opaque and diminished. My purpose is not to suggest reductively

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f ig ur e 3 Albrecht Dürer, Dürer’s Coat of Arms, 1523. Woodcut, 35.1 × 26.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1952, 52.581.1. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org.

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that American depictions of people of black-African descent are merely derivative of earlier European visual tropes. Rather, I seek to demonstrate and analyze how mid-nineteenth-century American artists and art writers of many different types adapted and transformed the European source material available to them in order to respond to the particular struggles about the character and destiny of African Americans. Most of these European sources were made in an earlier age, but a significant part of my discussion compares and links more or less contemporary European and American images and discourses. While the print I have begun with is intensely white supremacist, many of the images and texts examined address African and African American identity in less hostile and fearful ways. A crucial subset of the artists and writers considered here were themselves African American, and in these cases I am also concerned with what such individuals made of European art in general. This is thus a book about the contribution of peoples of black-African descent to the creation of salient features of the fine arts in the United States and, more broadly, the world of transatlantic culture, as well as a book about the visual representation of such people, during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The period from 1840 to 1880 witnessed, in American historical terms, the most critical phase of the great debate over slavery and abolition, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, but this study is not a visual history of those events.12 Instead, through a series of focused investigations, it seeks to describe two interrelated phenomena: the distinctive sensitivity of “white” American artists and consumers of art to “black” subjects within both the European tradition of high art and contemporary images by Americans, and African Americans’ attraction to and engagement with that European tradition. Because slavery in the Americas was fundamentally marked by skin color and (to a lesser

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but still significant degree) by the shape of lips, nose, hair, and other body parts, the visual arts were highly charged sites for exploring and articulating notions of racial difference. This is even true of certain famous works, such as Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave (see fig. 24), in which the complete visual absence of any hint of African identity nevertheless called forth, in both word and image, racialized commentary. Some of the works I take up in this study assign African or African American subjects a central position, but I am just as interested in works in which such subjects occupy relatively marginal spaces, physically and conceptually. There is plenty of evidence that Civil War–era Americans, black and white, were quite attentive to visual details of this kind. Several of my chapters concentrate on African Americans whose careers have been largely forgotten, such as the sculptor Eugène Warburg and the collector, journalist, and community leader Edward M. Thomas. Others are more concerned with canonical figures in American and European cultural history—George Washington, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Frederick Douglass, John Ruskin, the art historian and cultural critic Charles Eliot Norton, and the Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese—but these figures are explored from unfamiliar vantage points. Two widely known works by the German American painter Emanuel Leutze are explored in depth, but many of the works discussed here are little known, and my analysis extends also to lost works and even to pictures and sculptures that were contemplated and proposed but never executed. Art criticism, both formal and informal, plays a significant part in my analysis, and the use of the visual arts by American novelists and critics to help construct African and African American identity is also an integral part of this study. I have exploited three key bodies of primary-source data in the research for this book. In addition to the

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numerous images I have “collected” over many years of scholarship in this field, I have also made extensive use of the Image of the Black in Western Art Photo Archive, initially developed by the Menil Foundation and now housed and maintained at both the Hutchins Center at Harvard and the Warburg Institute at the University of London (and also available through Artstor). Equally important in determining the direction of my research was my thorough study of more than five hundred published memoirs of European travel and guidebooks to Europe written by American authors before 1890, which I have supplemented with as many unpublished diaries and letters as I could locate. Some of these travel memoirs were published in newspapers and journals, which the wave of recent digitization has made much more accessible. A third body of data comprises writing about the fine arts and European culture in both the African American and white antislavery (and later pro-Reconstruction) press. Beyond these sources I have looked at a good bit of American fiction, though I make no claims to a comprehensive examination in this area. My engagement with this scholarly topic stems from the work of my father, Sidney Kaplan, who in the 1960s extended his earlier exploration of African American history and the literary representation of blackness in Melville and Poe toward a consideration of how African Americans were depicted in American art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first concrete product of this research was his essay in the catalogue to The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, a 1964 exhibition at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, whose fiftieth anniversary was recently commemorated at Bowdoin.13 Shortly after this, though only in my teens, I became a kind of research assistant to my father, who pointed me toward an investigation of the European antecedents of the American images he was studying. This set the course of my art-historical

career, which has concentrated on European images of Africans and Afro-Europeans from the Middle Ages until the end of the early modern period. After his death, in 1993, however, I began to reflect more seriously on the nineteenth-century American imagery out of which my European research had initially evolved, and this was further spurred by a chance encounter with a perplexing passage in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. In this best-selling 1869 account of a European trip taken in 1867, Twain devotes several pages to the (unnamed) tour guide who introduced him both to the artistic splendors of Venice and to the term “Renaissance.”14 Twain describes this man as the son of South Carolina slaves and at the same time elegant, learned, and fully acculturated to his European environment. My book developed out of the urge to know more about this remarkable individual and the conditions that made his existence and professional life possible. As always in dealing with the problematic cultural construct of race, terminology presents some challenges in this study. The mid-nineteenth-century texts discussed here refer to Negroes, mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons, terms contaminated by racist discourse that I do not (for obvious reasons) employ in my own analysis. But the taxonomic terms I do use here have their own difficulties, though I believe they are necessary to a study of nineteenth-century attitudes toward people wholly or in part descended from dark-skinned Africans from south of the Sahara. I use the adjective “black” and the phrase “people of color” to denote any and all such individuals; that is, both black Africans and all the peoples of the African diaspora (including both African Americans and Afro-Europeans). “White,” as reductive as “black” and just as difficult to dispense with, here signifies lighter-skinned Europeans and the descendants of European colonists in the Americas. Even by the mid-1800s most African Americans had white as well as black ancestors, but I reserve the term

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“mixed race” for those whose ancestry was explicitly acknowledged to include whites as well as blacks. The term “American” includes individuals of any complexion. I use the term “Italian” mostly as a linguistic/ cultural construct, at least up until the founding of the Italian state, in 1860. As for the term “slave,” I seek to avoid it in describing individual human beings living in bondage; in works of art, I do employ it when it is clear that artists meant to denote someone of this legal status. A full discussion of the rapidly growing scholarship in the fields touched upon in this study is impossible here, but it is particularly important to note some of the earliest forays into the history of European and American images of people of color. As one would expect, African American writers were the pioneers. William Cooper Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) includes perhaps the first attempts to use historical works of art as evidence for African American history. The first scholar to create an in-depth art-historical study was Freeman H. M. Murray, whose Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture was written largely in 1913 and published in 1916. This is still a useful text, sophisticated and effective in drawing meaning from the works of art it treats. Few realize that Murray had actually begun his exploration of the topic with a focus on earlier European, rather than recent American, works, and his 1912 essay, “‘The Adoration of the Magi,’ with Special Reference to Mabuse’s Painting,” published in the A.M.E. Church Review, is equally illuminating. Joel A. Rogers, in a series of popular but deeply researched works beginning in the 1930s,15 delved into many aspects of the Western iconography of blackness, and in 1940 Alain Locke’s Negro in Art provided the first broad overview. Subsequent to his essay for the 1964 Bowdoin catalogue, my father, Sidney Kaplan, went on to write the catalogue for a 1973 exhibition at the National Portrait

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Gallery, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800; in 1991 this was republished in a new edition, prepared with my mother, Emma Nogrady Kaplan. In the meantime, other significant treatments of the representation of African Americans in American art appeared: Ellwood Parry’s Image of the Indian and the Black Man in American Art, 1590–1900 (1974), Peter Wood’s Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (1988), Guy McElroy’s Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1940 (in conjunction with an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, 1990), and Albert Boime’s Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (1990). The last years of the Menil Foundation phase of the Image of the Black in Western Art project produced in 1989 Hugh Honour’s two incredibly useful volumes on the nineteenth century in both Europe and the United States, republished (though hardly altered) by Harvard University Press in 2012.16 Other crucial studies that have illuminated various parts of the material I take up have appeared since 1990. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), though it is not principally focused on the nineteenth century, has transformed the discussion about the black diaspora and transatlantic culture, and some of Gilroy’s insights are developed further in Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (2000) as well as his Horrible Gift of Freedom (2010). Wood’s books address some of the same images and themes I consider here, though usually from a different vantage point. Both Vivien Green Fryd’s Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (1992) and Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) boldly define the issues around the public representation of black bodies. Among the most recent monographs that intersect with and illuminate aspects of my

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topic, Gwendolyn Shaw’s Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (2006) and Melissa Dabakis’s Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (2014) should be noted. Another perspective on some of the sculptural works I discuss here can be found in Charmaine Nelson’s Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in NineteenthCentury America (2007). Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century (2014), edited by Adrienne Childs and Susan Libby, offers an array of approaches to relevant European material; the second chapter, on Eugène Warburg, is an expansion of my essay published in that volume.17 For a deeper look at early modern European images of people of color, the reader should consult the three parts of volume 3 of The Image of the Black in Western Art (2010–11), two of which include my own contributions on Italian art.18 Many of the aforementioned publications reflect the insights about Western constructions of “otherness” developed by postcolonial studies over the last four decades. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was one of the founding treatises of this critical movement, and though Said primarily discusses texts, his work has had a significant impact on the critique of visual images. The emphasis in postcolonial analyses is usually on uncovering the cultural mechanisms of oppression or—as in Eric Lott’s Love and Theft (1993), a study of the discourse of minstrelsy—on the tensions between the desires both to master and to emulate the “other.” Parts of the present study are broadly indebted to these approaches, but this book also aims to show that the high status (in American eyes) of European culture was not always deployed as a form of subjugation but could also be leveraged (by both black and white artists and art writers) to create opportunities for the social and artistic advancement of people of color. The chapters that follow are each more or less self-contained, though chapters 1 and 6 have certain

links. Chapter 1 looks at the surprisingly conspicuous presence of remarks about people of black-African descent and their representation in the visual arts in American travel writing about Italy during the middle of the nineteenth century. The writings of William Dean Howells are central to this analysis and serve as a framework to help categorize the comments of many other authors. Chapter 2 turns to a particular African American artist, Eugène Warburg of New Orleans (1825/26–1859), and carefully traces the sometimes astonishing twists and turns of the European phase of his career (1853–59). Warburg’s affiliation with pro-slavery American diplomats as well as the leading transatlantic antislavery figures Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Duchess of Sutherland are highlighted, along with a consideration of the possible echoes of Warburg’s brief career in later art and literature. Chapter 3 is organized around a fine-grained examination of depictions of African Americans throughout the work of the German American artist Emanuel Leutze (1816–1868). The first half of the chapter focuses on the African American figure in Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), exploring this iconographic element in the context of the many images—from both sides of the Atlantic—of George Washington accompanied by a black soldier, servant, or allegorical character. The latter portion of the chapter concentrates on Leutze’s 1862 mural in the U.S. Capitol, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, as well as others of the artist’s late works depicting African Americans, including his final, unfinished project for a mural on the theme of emancipation. Chapter 4 takes up the strange, art-inflected dialogue about slavery and emancipation conducted by two of the most prominent art historians of the mid-nineteenth century, the American Charles Eliot Norton and the Englishman John Ruskin. The key image here is Ruskin’s 1858 copy of a black African

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figure in the work of the Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese, and the key text, from late 1862, is a letter of Ruskin’s that deploys Veronese’s work to attack Norton’s support of the Emancipation Proclamation. Moving from white to black intellectuals, chapter 5 looks at the unexpected enthusiasm of African American journalists and activists for the European tradition in the visual arts and at their promotion of art making in this mode as a tool of political solidarity and racial uplift. Works by Frederick Douglass, along with other black leaders (including Edward M. Thomas), are analyzed, and the threads linking this literature to the early twentieth-century revival of interest in the history of images of people of color are traced. Chapter 6, finally, attempts to flesh out and contextualize the still incompletely identified “son of South Carolina slaves,” a resident of Venice who, in 1867, was Mark Twain’s guide to the mysteries of Renaissance painting in the lagoon city. In Twain’s Innocents Abroad, this learned man is referred to as “a contraband guide,” and the deep resonance of this phrase, invented during the Civil War, is also explored. One perhaps unexpected feature of this study is the absence of a sustained focus on the sculptor Edmonia Lewis. By any account Lewis is a highly significant figure in the history of nineteenth-century transatlantic black culture, and her Forever Free (1867) (fig. 4) a fascinatingly contradictory expression of the forces and ideas shaping and limiting the representation of African American identity after the Civil War. This famous work and her complex biography have, however, recently been the subjects of extended scholarly analysis (by Kristen Pai Buick, Charmaine Nelson, Melissa Dabakis, Marilyn Richardson, and others), which I prefer not to replicate here.19 I do not mean to imply that nothing more remains to be learned or said about Lewis; the startling recent discovery that she died not in Italy but rather in England is a reminder of how many other lacunae

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concerning her life and art still exist.20 Lewis and some of her works are discussed in what follows as they connect to various issues taken up in individual chapters. More broadly, one of the goals of this study is to provide a far fuller context for considering Lewis and her career. Even in the light of what I have uncovered about sustained African American interest in the European artistic tradition, Lewis and her sculpture retain their singularity, though I hope to persuade the reader that her career was a little less anomalous than often supposed.

f ig ur e 4 Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867. Marble. Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo: Howard University Gallery of Art.

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This study also provides, I hope, a longer historical lens for thinking about later cohorts of African American visitors to and expatriates in continental Europe, beginning with Henry Ossawa Tanner and W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1880s and 1890s. For these and other African American artists, performers, writers, and intellectuals (up through the era of James Baldwin), Europe was not merely a place of refuge and/or delight but also the embodiment of a cultural tradition to which African Americans could lay claim with as much vigor as their white compatriots. That sensibility was already in formation before the Civil War, and white Americans of the day were beginning to notice it as well. It is now time for Americans and Europeans of our own day to acknowledge this striking aspect of Civil War–era transatlantic culture.

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1

Representations of People of Color in

Nineteenth-Century American Accounts of Italian Travel

Some fastidious writers are afraid to call things by their proper names, considering it more appropriate to paint an African with a brownish color than to shock the beholder with a picture of a man with a black face! I can not take the reader through Europe in that way. To paint a negro we need black paint, and to describe scenes which are unfamiliar we need words and language that is not used in the drawing room or parlor every time we meet. — G E O R G E H . H E F F N E R , The Youthful Wanderer, 1876

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he ai m i n t hi s initial chapter is to give some idea of the broad range of material referring to peoples of the African diaspora in American travel writing about Italy during the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the period from the 1830s to around 1880. Though some of the texts to be discussed refer to experiences elsewhere on the European continent, Italy—and especially Venice and Rome— prompted by far the largest number of comments about issues of race and color during this period. Though African Americans themselves traveled far more frequently to Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, France, only a few white American authors were prompted to meditate on black identity in their accounts of those nations. Italy, however, repeatedly prompted such reflections, which often (but not always) address visual

imagery. No single factor explains Italy’s salience in this respect, but several themes emerge. Even early in the nineteenth century some texts of interest can be found, though before around 1830 the references to racial identity are rarely explicit. For example, on November 29, 1807, a traveler from Boston was invited to observe, from a private palace on the Grand Canal, the triumphal entry of the emperor Napoleon into Venice. This grand spectacle, however, was less absorbing to the American visitor than his discovery that the house of his host, a wealthy and cultivated Venetian Jew named Iseppo Albrizzi, was lavishly decorated with works of art, and especially with a series of prints based on famous paintings with American themes. He eagerly took note of engravings after compositions by the best-known North 11

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American–born painters—Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and John Trumbull. West’s Death of General Wolfe is mentioned, as is Copley’s Watson and the Shark and Trumbull’s Battle of Bunker Hill. West’s 1770 picture, set outside the walls of Quebec City, famously features a prominent Native American figure, while the other two compositions conspicuously include African American characters. Though our traveler does not remark on this aspect of the works he admired, he does mention that during this part of his trip he was constantly accompanied by two other Americans: a certain Captain S. and the captain’s (unnamed) African American servant. The Bostonian was gratified to see his continent celebrated in such a center of Old World culture, but was the African American visitor equally taken with the pictorial references to the human diversity of the Americas?1 While this (presumably) white Bostonian was then a rather rare bird of passage in the city of lagoons, his friend’s black servant was less of an anomaly. SubSaharan Africans had been brought as slaves to Venice from at least the fourteenth century, and their often-free descendants lived there as well; black African soldiers, Christian pilgrims, and other visitors also passed through the city from time to time.2 While Venice’s black population probably peaked in the 1490s, when many of the city’s numerous gondoliers were African, a visible presence of dark-skinned men and women was sustained into the eighteenth century, and records indicate a new infusion of free people of color from the Caribbean even during the Napoleonic interlude (1806–14) I have been discussing.3 Moreover, the long-standing black presence in the city was visible in the paintings and sculptures ornamenting churches and public buildings; even if American visitors had visited only the exteriors of the public buildings in Piazza San Marco and the interiors of the churches of San Marco and the Frari, they would have noticed this aspect of Venetian art.4

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how el l s an d

venetian life

Though I have begun with an early example, a purely chronological structure is not the best way to apprehend the denser concentration of relevant comments between 1830 and 1880.5 Instead, it makes sense to use one author, William Dean Howells (1837–1920), and in particular one text, the travel memoir Venetian Life—his first book, published in 1866 and often reissued—as a point of departure. Howells, like Mark Twain, began his career as an outsider from the hinterland, and his Venetian Life, like Twain’s 1869 Innocents Abroad, was a bestselling travel memoir that effectively established the author’s career. Venetian Life is an account of Howells’s four years as American consul in Venice during the Civil War, though there is little in the book about his official duties. Howells’s early work as a printer and journalist in Ohio brought him into contact with the Republican Party, and his 1860 campaign biography of Lincoln earned him his patronage job as consul in Venice.6 This was a kind of post often sought by American writers and artists, to gain exposure to European culture and to provide some time for creative endeavors. Howells’s consulship lasted from 1861 to 1864 and effectively kept him safe, far from the carnage of Civil War battlefields. There can be little doubt that Howells generally subscribed to antislavery views by the time he wrote the campaign biography, but like Lincoln himself at the beginning of the Civil War, he was by no means a radical abolitionist.7 As reflected in Venetian Life, Howells’s opinions about African Americans as a “race” were contradictory and often marked by the substantial doubts about their abilities, commonly expressed even by many pro-Union and antislavery white Americans. Given that the book is exclusively focused on Howells’s experience of living in an Old World city with a rich history and a decaying but picturesque present, it is startling how often Howells adverts to comments on the nature of people of African descent. But of course he was

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f ig ur e 5 Adoration of the Magi, 1500, restored 1750s. Painted wood. Torre dell’Orologio, Venice. Photo: author.

f ig ur e 6 African Magus from the Adoration of the Magi, 1500, restored 1750s (fig. 5).

closely following the war news from the United States, and he may have estimated that an immediately postwar readership would want some evidence that he had been thinking through this essential problem of American life even during his expatriate interlude. There are at least a half dozen significant “race”inflected passages in Venetian Life (and in Howells’s letters from the same period, published in the Boston Advertiser), of which the most salient, complex, and troubling is a characterization of the ca. 1500 sculptural group of the Adoration of the Magi (figs. 5–6), a set of mechanical figures that periodically emerge to worship the Madonna and Child prominently displayed on the clock tower (Torre dell’Orologio) in Piazza San Marco.8 In his description of these mechanical wooden statues in action, Howells concludes as follows:

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Last [comes] the Ethiopian prince, gorgeous in green and gold, who, I am sorry to say, burlesques the whole solemnity. His devotion may be equally heart-felt, but it is more jerky than that of the others. He bows well and adequately, but recovers his balance with a prodigious start, altogether too suggestive of springs and wheels. Perhaps there is a touch of the pathetic in this grotesque fatality of the black king, whose suffering race has always held mankind between laughter and tears, and has seldom done a fine thing without leaving somewhere the neutralizing absurdity; but if there is, the sentimental may find it, not I.9 Here Howells uses the most common and generally the most favorable major role assigned to Africans in Renaissance art to demean, rather than exalt, the “race.” The black African Wise Man, an iconographic motif of German origin, which became canonical throughout Europe by the end of the 1400s, principally signified the universality of both the actual and the potential communities of Christian believers.10 The clock-tower sculptures we see today (and Howells saw in the 1860s) had been refashioned in the 1750s, but they are surely very similar to those erected in 1500.11 The clock tower’s black African Magus/King was probably the first fully public articulation of this sacred character in Venice and one of the most conspicuous versions to be seen anywhere in Europe.12 The mechanical movements of all of the figures in the group are identical, and no other writer has ever characterized those of the black figure as particularly clumsy or ridiculous.13 Indeed, there is little to suggest that anything about the group was intended to be comic. (By the late 1500s European artists began to imbue certain images of Africans with grotesquely comic attributes, which became much more widespread in European and American imagery from the late eighteenth century on, but in any period the comic is rarely

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a feature of images of the Magi.)14 Yet Howells’s characterization ends up by superimposing a nineteenthcentury minstrel-show trope upon this Renaissance sculpture. Howells demeans the black Magus of the Venice clock tower in two further ways. Perhaps the harshest is his claim that the figure is at best proficient only at bowing, as if to imply an inborn subordination among people of his “race.” And Howells’s use of the term “prince” is a subtle demotion, since the Magi are usually regarded as kings as well as sages. Traditional European iconography did leave an opening for Howells’s condescension: in most cases (as here) the African king is the youngest as well as the third and last in line to greet Christ, which was undoubtedly intended by some artists and perceived by some viewers as expressing a racial hierarchy.15 Although other American observers of the period mention both the black Magus/King on the clock tower and similar characters elsewhere in Italy, their observations do not echo Howells’s critique. In Rome the association of the Magi with blackness is more emphatic among American writers than their European contemporaries. Among works of art, the most noticed example was a group of wax sculptures of the Adoration on the high altar of the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle. In an 1846 account of the Christmas season in Rome, the Reverend William Ingraham Kip admired the splendor of the figures, including the black Magus/ King, but like the many other Protestant clergymen who wrote about Italian sacred art, he was disturbed by hints of idolatry in their display.16 In 1870 Caroline Hyde Butler Laing, an energetic widow living in Rome with her son-in-law, the American painter and poet T. Buchanan Read, saw these sculptures at a Mass on the Feast of the Magi (the Epiphany, January 6). She specially remarked on the “Ethiopian monarch, black as night, most gorgeously arrayed, with his slaves behind him bearing jeweled caskets, and other rich gifts.”17

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Black African attendants to the Magi are common in European art and in fact predate the insertion of the black African Wise Man himself, but they are almost never explicitly depicted as slaves, so the diction here betrays the observer’s American mind-set.18 She also remarked on the Armenian priests of the church, “dark as [mulattos], but with pleasant features.”19 Laing may have been specially attentive to dark-skinned people and objects in Rome, as her son-in-law is known to have employed a black domestic servant there, probably of American origin.20 She also records being transfixed by an image of Mary and the infant Christ with black skin—a so-called Black Madonna—in the church of Santa Maria della Pace; she cannot quite approve of it but notes with interest how venerated it was by Romans.21 (By the 1800s such images were widespread in Italy and Europe, though they had generally been created without any intent to depict African ethnicity and lack markers of African appearance beyond skin color.)22 Laing is also perhaps the only American observer of her era to remark on an early thirteenth-century mosaic, still in situ, on the gate to the Trinitarian monastery of San Tommaso in Formis, though she does not specifically describe the one black and one white captive to either side of Christ’s throne.23 Laing, like Howells, certainly displayed some ambivalence about the decorum of dark skin in a sacred context, but like several other Americans in Rome in this era, she was favorably impressed by the inclusiveness of Roman Catholicism with regard to class and ethnicity. Though she does not explicitly mention people of black-African descent, a visit to the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, filled with Italians, Americans, Russians, and Turks, rich and poor alike, prompted Laing to express how much she admired this feature of Catholic Rome, even though as a Protestant she found other aspects of the papal church repugnant.24 Whereas in the early decades of the century

an anti-Catholic New Yorker in Rome described the inclusion of an Abyssinian Christian pilgrim among the “apostles” whose feet were washed by the pope in a Holy Week ceremony as a distasteful example of merely affected humility, attitudes began to change in the 1830s.25 James Fenimore Cooper, in 1831, was rather charmed by a meeting with a learned African priest in Piazza San Pietro as they awaited a papal benediction.26 In 1836 the prominent Unitarian minister Orville Dewey, who sought to temper the deeply rooted hostility of American Protestants to the Roman Church, wrote of having attended several events at the Propaganda Fide, the institution charged with disseminating Catholicism to every quarter of the globe.27 The Propaganda’s grand palace was located in the Piazza di Spagna, which by the 1830s was the epicenter of foreign tourism in the city and the preferred residential neighborhood for American and other expatriates, including artists and writers. The chapel inside the Propaganda’s palace, designed by Borromini, had long been dedicated to the Magi, with a painting of the Adoration, including a black Magus/King and several African attendants, on the high altar (fig. 7).28 As the American intellectual (and first professor of art history in the United States) Charles Eliot Norton later explained, the Magi’s “relation to this institution arises from the belief that the visit of the three kings to the manger, and their adoration of the Infant Saviour, were typical of the final subjection of all heathen nations to the throne of Christ.”29 Among many others, priests from Christian Africa and the African diaspora were trained here, and Dewey was especially struck by the Ethiopian priest saying Mass during the January week of the Feast of the Magi. A few days later he attended an increasingly popular event during which seminarians from around the world read sacred passages in Latin, Italian, and their own languages; though a white Philadelphian performed well, “it was especially striking to

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observe how the feelings of the whole audience took part with a black Ethiop boy, and gave him, evidently on that account alone, a far heartier reception than to any other.”30 An even clearer statement that the Catholic outreach to people of color and the ordination of black priests were practices the reformed churches could usefully emulate was made by the Episcopal priest William Kip, whose description of a sculpture of a black Magus has already been cited. Having attended the Feast of the Magi at the Propaganda in 1845 and specially noticing two African seminarians as well as a venerable Abyssinian priest, Kip declared that “in this respect Rome carries out her own Catholic principles and declares, not only in words but by her actions, that ‘God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.’”31 Dewey and Kip were progressive clerics who leaned toward a less hostile position vis-à-vis the papal church, but the responses of Americans to the ceremonies at the Propaganda cannot always be predicted by their ideological positions on religion or slavery. The popular travel author Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Lippincott), an abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass’s, found the African languages at the Propaganda recitations of 1853 “rude, warlike, and barbaric in sound,” though she certainly did take notice of them.32 On the other hand, in 1843 the fiercely pro-slavery South Carolina painter James De Veaux (1812–1844), who had come to Rome thanks to the financial help of Wade Hampton II (one of the largest slaveholders of the day), was more impressed with the Propaganda’s African students: “Three or four coal black skins were among them, and the Ethiopian’s language agreeably surprised me.”33 More predictably, the South Carolina–born Angelica Singleton Van Buren, the daughter-in-law of President Martin Van Buren and the official White House hostess during his term of office, was more dismissive: “Two

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orators black as ink. One darky’s poem began ‘sono nero’—personal allusion.”34 This 1855 report, however, suggests that the sacred excerpts read by Africans at the Propaganda were sometimes tailored to their identity. “Sono nero” (I am black) are the first words of a famous passage in Song of Songs, usually rendered “I am black but beautiful,” spoken by a woman who identifies herself as the bride of Solomon.35 Of all the American reactions to Africans at the Propaganda, that of the remarkable journalist and feminist Margaret Fuller is the most complex. Already well established in Rome and devoted to both an Italian lover and the cause of Italian revolution, Fuller in January of 1848 paid a visit to the celebrations at the Propaganda. As a person always compelled to speak her own mind, she regretted that the seminarians were obliged to recite texts rather than speak for themselves. Again, she was especially fixated on the performers of color: “Among those who appeared to best advantage were several blacks, and the majesty of the Latin hexameters was confided to a full-blooded Guinea negro, who acquitted himself better than any other I heard. I observed, too, the perfectly gentlemanly appearance of these young men, and that they had nothing of that Cuffy swagger by which those freed from a servile state try to cover a painful consciousness of their position in our country. Their air was self-possessed, quiet and free beyond that of most of the lily-livered.”36 Her emphasis on the dignity of the Africans is rather spoiled by the invidious comparison with the behavior of free African Americans: Cuffy, a common slave name, is used to denote all black Americans, and a touch of Howells’s fatalism is evident here in the hint that African Americans might never purge themselves of a deforming imperfection of character. Fuller, at least, provides a historicized, rather than an essentialist, cause for this condition and adds an intriguing critique of whiteness by using “lily-livered” rather than “lily-white.”

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f ig ur e 7 Giacinto Gimignani, Adoration of the Magi, 1624–35. Oil on canvas. Chapel of the Magi, Palazzo di Propaganda Fide, Rome. Photo: akg-images / Andrea Jemolo / Eliana Pallisco.

t he pe sar o t om b

Venice offers an iconographic approach to blackness of an entirely different sort. Howells and many other Americans were clearly astonished by the tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro (d. 1659) in the church of the Frari in Venice (fig. 8). This 1669 monument was architecturally conceived by Baldassare Longhena and sculpted by Juste Le Court and Melchior Barthel.37 Much of the

tomb—including the portrayal of Pesaro, a largely ineffectual leader—is rhetorically conventional, but the four colossal, writhing, grimacing African men who serve as atlantes supporting the effigy of the deceased are hard to ignore (fig. 9). Derived from the classical idea that defeated captives should hold up the monuments of their vanquishers, they appear to make (overblown) reference to the doge’s success against the Ottoman Turks in the struggle for Crete; Crete had in fact been reconquered by the Ottomans by the time the monument was erected. The contrast between the black marble of the figures and the white marble of their ragged garments is handled with considerable virtuosity. Whereas the black Magus/ King is a holy and regal figure, the atlantes of the Pesaro tomb are subdued demons, infidel Turks who acknowledge only the violent force of captivity but not the Christian god.38 While it is true, as Charles Eliot Norton pointed out, that the Magi themselves were symbols of the “subjection” of heathen nations to Christ, their subjection is voluntary, and they are honored for it, and it is a subjection not confined to those with dark skin. Late baroque sculpture had long been out of fashion by the mid-nineteenth century, and English and other European travel essayists generally fail to mention this tomb in their accounts of Venetian masterworks, while those who do cite it ignore the African figures.39 Early nineteenth-century guidebooks in English like Galignani’s do not speak of it, but the author of the first edition of the London publisher John Murray’s influential Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842), Sir Francis Palgrave, calls it “a curious specimen of the odd taste of the 17th century” and notes the black-marble “Negroes.” In the sixth edition (1856), “odd taste” is replaced by “bad taste.”40 American visitors frequently wrote of it in letters and travel memoirs. Howells’s words about it are rather restrained compared to his explication of the black Magus/King on the clock tower. In a section devoted to the imagined

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f igur e 8 Baldassare Longhena, Juste Le Court, and Melchior Barthel, tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1669. Marble. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Didier Descouens. CC BY-SA 4.0 International.

f ig ur e 9 Africans from Baldassare Longhena, Juste Le Court, and Melchior Barthel, tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1669 (fig. 8). Photo: author.

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peregrinations of a Venetian tomcat, Howells remarks that “he has been all over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro, and he knows whether the griffins descend from their perches at the midnight hour to bite the naked knees of the ragged black caryatides.”41 Howells’s Venetian Life makes no pretense to being a conventional guidebook to the city—he was, after all, not really a tourist in Venice—but as the Pesaro tomb had already been noted in at least a dozen recent American travel accounts, he perhaps felt that he needed to work it in somehow. Of these earlier references (which begin in 1846), the most notable is in George Stillman Hillard’s Six Months in Italy, published in 1853 and often reissued. Hillard was appalled by the tomb, calling it “a caricature in marble” and claiming that “in grotesqueness and bad taste this monument has no rival in all Europe.” The main target of his distaste was the Africans: “The most prominent objects are four enormous negroes, or Moors, of black marble, but dressed in jackets and trowsersm[sic] of white marble, and, oddest of all, the artist has represented them with their knees and elbows protruding through rents in their garments.”42 He was evidently not upset by the dehumanization of the figures but rather regarded them as an unforgivable breach of decorum. Hillard (1808–1879) enjoyed a successful career as a Massachusetts lawyer, politician, and writer, and as a younger man was one of the closest friends of Charles Sumner. They became law partners and in the early 1840s shared an interest in abolitionism. Hillard, however, did not follow Sumner’s radical path, and in the late 1840s he adhered to the faction of the “Cotton Whigs,” who argued for an entente with Southern slaveholders, which resulted in the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law. When Sumner was elected a Massachusetts senator on an antislavery platform in 1851, Hillard supported his opponent. Like Howells, he wrote a campaign biography, but his was the 1864 Life and Campaigns of George

D. McClellan, Lincoln’s Democratic opponent. In the 1850s Hillard’s wife, Susan, apparently concealed fugitive slaves in the attic of their house, but it is not clear if her husband knew of this, and in his official duties he was supposed to assist in the recapture of escaped slaves.43 The Pesaro tomb, wrote Hillard, “is like the monstrous architecture of a feverish dream, and there is matter enough in it for a whole stud of nightmares.”44 Perhaps Hillard saw a connection to the nightmare of American slavery and the intractable national political struggles and personal moral choices it had engendered, which he preferred to repress. The New York Republican legislator and educator Erastus C. Benedict was equally alarmed by the black-marble Africans, although he was more forthright about the reason for it. Benedict’s Run Through Europe recounted an 1854 trip but was published only in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Benedict did not criticize the style of the tomb, but his interpretation of the African figures is revealing: “A most striking, singular and stupendous monument is that erected to the Doge Giovanni Pesaro. One would think it was as much a monument in honor of negro slavery as of the Doge, although I am not informed that he had any connection with slavery. The tomb is supported by brawny and gigantic negroes, sculptured in black marble, dressed in white marble, ragged and rent, through the tatters of which their black knees and elbows stick out, and their ebony skins are exposed.”45 Two of the many post–Civil War descriptions of the Africans in the monument are of particular interest because they confuse the physical task of the statues (to hold up a structure supporting the doge himself ) with forms of black labor more typical of the nineteenth century: a published account of an 1869 trip asserts the cushions above the men’s shoulders are bales of cotton, whereas one of 1895 affirms that they are bags of coffee.46

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In Innocents Abroad (1869) Mark Twain, too, writes of the tomb.47 The interior of the Frari is the only Venetian church interior that he describes, and the Pesaro tomb takes up most of this, but his account of the African figures is brief and generic: “four colossal Nubians, as black as night, dressed in white marble garments.” He judges the work as a whole ingenious but absurd. However, it was selected by Twain or his editor for illustration (the only illustration of the tomb I have been able to find in travel books of the day), and the illustrator (probably True W. Williams) may not have had access to an image of the original, since the tomb in the picture (fig. 10) is largely unrecognizable.48 Twain’s familiar emphasis on the ragged clothing of the Africans is reproduced, but their stance, expression, and headgear (turbans) makes them look more like the conventional painted wooden statues of black African servants of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries that are often referred to today as “blackamoors.”49 This deformation would not have troubled Twain or his publishers, as the book’s illustrations are intentionally more humorous than accurate. But the decision to illustrate this monument at all confirms the iconic status of the Africans of the Pesaro tomb for Americans during the Civil War era. Perhaps the attention to these figures as a “monument in honor of negro slavery” consoled the writers and their audience, who could at least take comfort that the now-extinguished “peculiar institution” in the United States was not entirely an American invention.

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f ig ur e 1 0 True Williams, Tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1869. Wood engraving from Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (Hartford: American, 1869), 236. Photo: author.

Howells and his compatriots did not neglect yet another African character in their written responses to the city: Shakespeare’s Othello. The American perception of Italy was of course deeply tinted by the lens of Anglophone literature, from Shakespeare to

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Hawthorne, and in Venice few Americans failed to evoke Othello and The Merchant of Venice.50 This, of course, immediately endowed the city with associations of ethnic and religious diversity, and this perception was hardly historically inaccurate, even if the American writers mostly came by it secondhand. The poet and journalist Charles Warren Stoddard, for example, characterized modern Venice as still a cosmopolitan city “where every color, every creed, every caste is . . . represented,” and he explicitly mentioned Africans.51 Howells could not resist citing Othello, though he in fact took a more skeptical position than many others about the historicity of the Moor of Venice. It is clear that some American visitors were convinced that Othello and Desdemona were much more than fictional characters, and Venetian gondoliers and guides identified their dwellings (just as Juliet’s house and tomb were shown in Verona). In Venetian Life Howells treats Othello only in the context of the whims and practices of gondoliers, and when one of these boatmen points to the Moor’s residence, Howells caustically notes that the statue affixed to it is “happily darkened by time, and thus serves admirably to represent Othello’s complexion.”52 Since visual difference was so integral to notions of African identity, the urge to find some remaining visual trace of the Moor was strong enough to prompt at least a few Americans to find portraits of him. Howells was likely referring to a rough head or the full figure of a young man with a shield in a niche (neither of which really suggests African identity through its features), both attached to a building traditionally named as the house of Othello, near the church of the Carmine, and two later American accounts follow him in this; many others speak of the house without alluding to the statue.53 The same dwelling had already been pointed out to the progressive Alabama writer Octavia Le Vert in the 1850s, but she had a different and more remarkable idea about where to find Othello’s likeness:

“In the gallery [in the Venetian Ducal Palace] containing the busts of the ‘great captains of the republic,’ was one in black marble of Othello. It has perfect negro features, and crispy hair; they told us it was deemed a resemblance of the original.”54 I have not been able to find evidence of any such work on display in the Ducal Palace, but a bust of uncertain provenance in the Saint Louis Art Museum (fig. 11), carved by Melchior Barthel (the maker of the Africans on the Pesaro tomb), gives a reasonable idea of the kind of thing Le Vert might have seen.55 Barthel’s bust was not, of course, a depiction of Othello, as Shakespeare’s play was unknown in Italy in the 1600s, but it is easy to imagine that by the nineteenth century an object of this kind could have been identified with that tragic protagonist.56 Le Vert, unlike Howells, erases any distinction between Othello as fiction and Othello as fact. Since midcentury American performances of Othello, especially in the South but in the North as well, generally avoided showing the Moorish general with dark skin, it might be wondered why Howells and Le Vert were so ready to accept a black-African characterization of Othello.57 One American who was loath to accept a black-African Othello was the Louisiana sugar planter Henry Watkins Allen, later a Confederate governor of the state. In a travel memoir published just as the Union was breaking apart in 1861, Allen mentions Othello (without any characterization of race) in a section on Venice but then goes on to create a paradoxical racial displacement in his account of an incident in a Trieste café: “While I was sipping my coffee, a turbaned Turk as black as the ace of spades, with a shirt nearly as black as his skin, came up and took a seat by me on the large sofa, crossed his legs, and began puffing away his horrid tobacco smoke under my very nose. I felt like ‘taking by the throat the circumcised dog,’ and smiting him until he should know how to treat a Christian gentleman, but recollected that I was in Austria.”58 Allen’s

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f ig ur e 11 Melchior Barthel, Bust of an African, ca. 1660. Marble, 62.2 × 43.2 × 21.9 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. Funds given by Mr. and Mrs. R. Crosby Kemper Jr. through the Crosby Kemper Foundations, 54:1990. Image courtesy Saint Louis Art Museum.

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quotation from Othello’s description of how he once killed a Turk (5.2.355) is part of an inversion of Shakespeare’s color scheme, making the Christian Othello white and his Muslim enemy black. Nevertheless, the text of the play itself was of course unmistakable in reference to Othello’s blackness, and productions in both England and Italy (where the play was now extremely popular) were often faithful to it.59 Howells reported that his gondolier, without even knowing Shakespeare’s name, was certain Othello “was an African, and black.”60 The American actress Charlotte Cushman reviewed two rival performances of the tragedy in Florence in 1871, noting that the Othello of Ernesto Rossi was equivocal as to race, whereas “[Tommaso] Salvini makes him the negro pure and simple, with woolly hair, and in every gesture and mood he is the African.”61 Henry James was especially impressed by Salvini’s 1883 performance in London: “Salvini’s rendering of the part is the portrait of an African by an Italian; a fact which should give the judicious spectator, in advance, the pitch of the performance. There is a class of persons to whom Italians and Africans have almost equally little to say, and such persons must have been sadly out of their account in going to see Salvini.”62 Despite this warning, James judged Salvini the greatest Othello he had seen, passionate with “the rage of an African” but generous in nature.63 I shall eventually return to James’s suggestion that Italians and Africans occupied similar categories in many American minds, but right now I want to consider two intriguing phenomena that stand this idea on its head: first, the several reports by white American travelers that Italians (and sometimes other Europeans) believed that all Americans were black; and second, the remarkable tendency of some white American travelers in Italy to identify with African Americans, even to the point of seeing this oppressed group and their culture as central to American identity as a whole.

a m er ic an s as bl ac k In Venetian Life Howells describes his own, cherished, Venetian servant Bettina as “very dark, so dark and so Southern in appearance as almost to verge upon the negro type.” But then an odd inversion takes place in his text. He goes on to say that Bettina, profoundly ignorant of the world outside Venice, “believed that America lay a little to the south of Vienna, and in her heart I think she was persuaded that the real national complexion was black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw at our house were merely a multitude of exceptions.”64 This striking comment, which one might imagine Howells would have suppressed, is actually echoed in half a dozen other travel accounts and is not always attributed to an unsophisticated Italian. The blind Roman cardinal Albani, upon his introduction to the painter Benjamin West in 1760, is said to have been surprised to learn that he was white rather than black.65 The cardinal’s opinion was apparently shared by the learned black African priest whom James Fenimore Cooper met in Rome in 1831: “When I told him I was an American,” Cooper remarked, “he looked at me with interest, and I thought he was as much astonished at my colour as I could possibly be with his. What a missionary for America!”66 In a carriage leaving Italian-speaking Trieste for Vienna in 1853, the fashionable New York writer Nathaniel Parker Willis witnessed a discussion on the color of Americans between an Austrian merchant and an Italian pharmacist: “Our Gratz merchant was surprised of the light color of the officers [from an American vessel visiting Trieste] he had seen, and doubted if they were not Englishmen in the American service. He had always heard that Americans were black. ‘They are so,’ said the apothecary; ‘I saw the real Americans yesterday in a boat, quite black.’ (One of the cutters of the Constellation has a negro crew, which he had probably seen at the pier.) The

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assertion seemed to satisfy the doubts of all parties.”67 In 1867 Mrs. S. R. Urbino, the American author of a popular travel memoir, shocked the owner of an inn near Naples: “The padrona of the establishment said she had never seen but one American before me, and she was black. The poor woman seemed confounded with the idea of white Americans.”68 Most melodramatic of all is the 1845 account of William Mitchell Gillespie. This New Yorker was flirting with a young Roman woman at the Christmas celebrations in San Luigi dei Francesi, but the girl was brought up short when he revealed his nationality: “She . . . expanded her immense black eyes to an inconceivable size, when she heard that I was from America, and exclaimed, ‘Holy Virgin! you are as white as I am!’ In truth, I was rather whiter; but we are here generally supposed to be negroes; and the ‘Café Americano,’ in the Piazza d’Espagna, has an emblem of our country painted on its sign, in the head of a blackamoor, with woolly hair, flat nose, and Ethiopian lips.”69 Gillespie reverts to this theme later in his book: “Of America they [Romans] have a confused notion, which can scarcely be called an idea. Its inhabitants are generally supposed to be black, and I was once asked by a Roman lady how many wives we were allowed to have.”70 Even as late as 1910 an American traveler in Italy reported this reaction to his “whiteness”: “Why! Are you a native American? I thought Americans were black?”71 That this Italian conception of normative American skin color was actually manifested in a Roman shop sign would seem to indicate it was indeed a common view; Gillespie certainly thought so, and it clearly worried him enough to want to reassert immediately his claim to a superior racial rank: “In truth, I was rather whiter.”72 It might be imagined that some of these Italian opinions were based on ideas about Native Americans rather than African Americans. But Americans Indians were not typically characterized has having

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black skin in this era, and in any case they rarely traveled to Italy. Cardinal Albani’s remark about Benjamin West was interpreted in this key by the man who recounted it, West’s Scottish biographer John Galt, and West linked himself to his American roots by comparing the Vatican’s Apollo Belvedere to a Mohawk warrior and included such a warrior in his famous Death of General Wolfe (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).73 But Albani was the cardinal protector of the Roman Casa dei Catecumeni, an institution charged especially with converting non-European peoples and Jews to Catholicism, and he was familiar with the AfroCaribbean slaves who were baptized in this program.74 Romans had a particular reason to imagine Americans as black. Not far from San Luigi dei Francesi, where Gillespie had his encounter, lay the grand papal monument of the Fountain of the Four Rivers, created by Bernini in 1648–51.75 While the Nile, denoting Africa, was embodied by a bearded classicizing figure, the Rio de la Plata (symbolizing the Americas) was represented by a man unmistakably African in physiognomy (fig. 12), meant to suggest the many New World slaves that the Catholic Church was then targeting for conversion. On the other hand, one wonders whether the notion that Italians believed Americans to be black was not to some degree a projection by the white Americans themselves. Howells’s account of his servant Bettina’s view is presented as speculation, not fact, and the same can be said of Cooper’s guess about the African priest’s reaction to him. Why should a white American like Howells imagine that Italians would be perplexed by his complexion? There was of course a consciousness that by “American” a European did not always mean a person from the United States and that the skin color of those from the Caribbean, Central America, and South America was more likely to be darker. But perhaps another, more complex sensibility underlay this expectation that Italians might

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f ig ur e 12 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Rio de la Plata, from the Fountain of the Four Rivers, Piazza Navona, Rome, 1648–51. Marble. Photo: author.

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see even the United States itself as, at least in part, a black nation. When Howells and his American friends went for a picnic on the Lido (not yet a fashionable beach resort but rather a place for a rustic outing) on July 4, 1863, he recounted that his group “sang the songs of our own land, and the many-echoing canal responded to unwonted strains of what may be harmlessly called colored music.”76 The “harmlessly” shows some anxiety about this choice, but it is clear that these Americans already associated such music with their national identity. They regarded it as usefully distinct from an English or European tradition of song and thus particularly appropriate for an Independence Day celebration. Some years earlier Octavia Le Vert had introduced a different version of this concept, in her account of a dispute at the Venice railway station in 1853. Le Vert was being questioned along with her enslaved black African maid Betsey Lamar by an officious customs agent. “Then came the same questions to all the others, until they reached Betsey, whom he styled a Moor; whereupon she implored I would inform him she had nothing but pure American blood in her veins, and was a slave from the South. However, he insisted (as she was a mulatto) in ‘writing her down’ una Moretta.”77 Le Vert does not frame this interchange ironically and does not challenge the idea that a “mulatto” might have pure American blood, at least in an Italian context. The clearest but also perhaps the strangest expression of this white-American identification with black Americans abroad is found in a letter by the eminent poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell. Before the Civil War Lowell had been a notable abolitionist, serving as a corresponding editor for the National Anti-Slavery Standard, but after the war his views shifted considerably: he was not really a supporter of Reconstruction and often expressed condescending and demeaning opinions about African Americans.78 In an 1881 letter to the editor R. W. Gilder, Lowell apologizes

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for being too happy to be back in Venice: “I have seen a grave horse of thirty years, and a parson’s, too, gallop and fling up his heels and roll and do all kinds of indecorous things on being turned into a pasture. I am that animal—or even lengthen my ears if you will and I am that animal; I am an escaped prisoner of the Bastile [sic]; I am a fugitive slave; more than all, I am an American public nigger out for a holiday!”79 There is a mocking racism in this statement, but there may be other things as well. Both black and white Americans have often felt figuratively or literally liberated by European travel. Nevertheless, especially for white American men, the experience of Europe has often been daunting and humbling. Sometimes it was simply the shocked recognition that their elite status in the United States did not automatically carry over in repressive European monarchies: in 1854 the Virginian editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, John R. Thompson, was treated disrespectfully by the Austrian border police and remarked, “I began to feel like a negro.”80 In other cases the anxiety reflected a perceived lack of aristocratic status and cultural sophistication. In the 1881 letter Lowell casts his unbridled and innocent enthusiasm for the Old World as analogous to that of a freed slave before the prospect of liberty and at the same time worries perhaps that he may have too much of the “Cuffy swagger” critiqued by Margaret Fuller. As the “public nigger” is to Lowell, Lowell thinks, he is to the grand edifice of Venice and its culture.81

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A very different kind of association between American slavery and Italy had long been current in the writing of white (and also some black) Americans. In Venetian Life Howells several times touches on parallels between Venetians and African Americans. It is not merely that his serving woman, Bettina, a rustic from a

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nearby farming village on the Italian mainland, seems “almost to verge on the negro type” in her appearance.82 The Venetian poor, Howells points out, survive on a diet of cornmeal (polenta), fried fish (minnows), and watermelon, among the most essential foods of enslaved African Americans.83 This kind of parallel is not new with Howells. As early as 1828 the young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, recovering from an illness in the hills near Rome, wrote to his sisters of the misery of lower-class Italians: “they are poor—and lazy, and happy—I mean happy in their way:—for the negro slaves within the precincts of the Southern States are their equals in liberty, and infinitely their superiors in every comfort.”84 This trope has been shrewdly analyzed by Paola Gemme, who, in a study of American responses to the Italian national movement of liberation and unification, the Risorgimento, has discerned a whole series of interesting variations.85 Some, for example, affirmed (like Longfellow) that the Italian poor were even worse off than American slaves; others, that the two groups were equally happy in their poverty and powerlessness. The pro-slavery Southern intellectual William Gilmore Simms even suggested that the Italian poor would do better to submit to enslavement as field hands subject to the chastisement of the whip; other American slaveholders took a different tack, arguing that the subjection of Italians by local and foreign elites amounted to enslavement, which could not be justified since Italians were white.86 Of course, whether Italians should be classified as fully white was also under dispute—I have already shown instances of uncertainty on this point, and even Frederick Douglass regarded the Italian peninsula as the site of a gradual shift, from north to south, in the direction of dark skin.87 Abolitionists argued conversely that both Italians and African Americans were oppressed and should be supported. Black abolitionists attacked as hypocrites those Americans who cheered the Risorgimento

uprisings but not abolition at home. White abolitionists tended to emphasize their empathy with the suffering each group experienced, while black writers stressed that they were both in active rebellion. Howells, whose attitude toward the Risorgimento as expressed in Venetian Life is at best lukewarm, nevertheless admits, by alluding to the recently concluded American struggle, that the Venetian urge to join the new Italian nation is ultimately admirable. These are the closing lines of the original version of Venetian Life: “The Venetians desire now, and first of all things, Liberty, knowing that in slavery men can learn no virtues; and I think them fit, with all their errors and defects, to be free now, because men are never fit to be slaves.”88 At another point in the book, he also endows the Venetians with a sense of democratic solidarity: “I suspect it would be hard to find any Venetian of any vocation, however base, who forgets that he too is a man and a brother.”89 That last phrase, of course, directly evokes one of the most famous slogans (“Am I not a man and a brother?”) of the British and American antislavery movements. Venetian Life is hardly the best example of a vigorous vindication of either the Risorgimento or the full humanity of African Americans. Nearly two decades earlier, however, the most fervid American proponent of the Risorgimento, Margaret Fuller, had addressed these conjoined issues in a far more trenchant way. Here is Fuller in Rome in 1847, writing to her close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I listen to the same arguments against the emancipation of Italy, that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland, as for the conquest of Mexico.”90 This succinct declaration links American oppression at home to the imperialism of European elites on different continents. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in a still little-known letter entitled “Italian and American Liberty,” published in the Independent in 1860, restated Fuller’s views in more grandly rhetorical tones.

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Liberty! Americans have forgotten what the word means. Pampered children of prosperity, with both hands full of opportunity, and none to hinder the fullest use of it!—they know nothing of what liberty or slavery means! Only the Africans of the South are learning in a hard school to be patriots and heroes—learning in bitter sighings and endless longings how fair is Freedom. The Earthquake that shakes Austria and Italy and France is under America also!—the ground trembles there also with the approaching footsteps of the great Deliverer, who shall save the poor and needy, and precious shall their blood be in his sight. Blood of Roman peasant or African slave is alike the blood of Christ’s child, and for every drop will he reckon. America has reared one man in these degenerate days whose name burns as a coal upon foreign lips. Speak of John Brown to a Frenchman or Italian, and he says, “That noble man, that hero!” They can understand how a man should give his life for a hopeless cause, for they have lists of noble names that have done the same, and it is only when liberty and honor are dearer than life that nations are worthy to be free.91 Stowe, by this time an exceedingly famous author in both America and Europe, sent this declaration to the Independent, a progressive Congregationalist weekly known for its antislavery and pro-women’s-suffrage politics; her brother Henry Ward Beecher was already affiliated with it and was soon to become its editor.92 Stowe wrote these lines in Italy, where she was traveling as, among other things, a correspondent for the weekly; her Italian columns are filled with interesting details about local politics, life, and art. They are not always so eloquent or elevated. The same issue of the Independent, on another page, has a passage by Stowe about how Neapolitan airs have the “same careless abandon of gayety” as

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“negro melodies.”93 Two months later, in August of 1860, Stowe’s “Italian and American Liberty” was republished verbatim in Douglass’ Monthly, a periodical edited by Frederick Douglass that had previously called attention to the Risorgimento and was to continue to support it over the next few years.94 In the same issue Douglass, characteristically, made of Stowe’s figurative call to arms a much more radical provocation. He accused most white Americans of a failure of nerve, contrasting the rapturous reception of Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi by the Italian people with the absence of physical support for John Brown’s bold strike at Harper’s Ferry. “Why,” wrote Douglass, “should we shout when a tyrant is driven from his throne by Garibaldi’s bayonets, and shudder and cry peace at the thought that the American slave may one day learn the use of bayonets also?”95 Stowe, of course, had reached her antislavery convictions well before she embarked on her first voyage to Europe, in 1853. But for several notable white American intellectuals, European travel, particularly in Italy, was a key factor in their radicalization about the issue of abolition. Margaret Fuller, in the 1847 letter to Emerson just cited above, continues as follows: “How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never endure to be with them at home; they were so tedious, often so narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, after all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their desire and life; and, if it was not the only thing worth thinking of, it was really something worth living and dying for, to free a great nation from such a terrible blot, such a threatening plague. God strengthen them, and make them wise to achieve their purpose!”96 One year earlier the journalist and later folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland claimed to have had a similar epiphany. In a memoir dating to the end of his long life, Leland mentions an encounter he had with an African American waiter at a Venice hotel in 1846, which leads him into an attack

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on the myth of slaves’ devotion to their masters. At the end of this discussion, he remarks: “I had never thought of this subject before I left home. I did not like slavery, nor to think about it. But in Europe I did like such thought, and I returned fully impressed with the belief that slavery was, as Charles Sumner said, ‘the sum of all crimes.’”97 Sumner, the antislavery senator from Massachusetts, in fact had a comparable experience. Having just reached Italy on August 31, 1857, he wrote to his friend William Wetmore Story that “seeing my country from abroad gives a new detestation of Slavery and a new determination to fight the battle.”98 The most detailed and complex of these Italian revelations is that of the Massachusetts author Caroline Sturgis Tappan, daughter-in-law and niece of the prominent abolitionists Lewis and Arthur Tappan. Like Fuller, Tappan was a friend of Emerson’s, and while in Rome in 1857 she wrote to him that she despaired of having to return to the United States, “to that monotonous, formal life, to snows and slavery.” (No doubt the European trips of more than a few midcentury Americans were intended as escapes from the unyielding political and moral crises around slavery.) But she soon admitted that living in Italy did not in fact suppress her anxieties about American politics: “I should like to live out here until I could quite forget all the ‘great moral questions of the day,’ and not care much whether Kansas and Massachusetts are slave states or not. But I find here that Art seems less and Right more than even at home.”99 That heightened consciousness of the evil of slavery was surely stoked by Americans’ unavoidable contact with the ferment of the Risorgimento. But the end of the Civil War and the achievement of emancipation, along with the winding down of the Risorgimento, transformed and weakened this positive interconnection between Italian and African American liberation. Even Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist and author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was in 1868 already

pessimistic about the prospects for both African American and Italian advancement: “Like the modern Greek, the modern Celt, and the modern negro, the Italian peasant wants a century or two of education toward modern ideas.”100 Following up on the success of Venetian Life in 1866, Howells quickly (in 1867) published another travel book entitled Italian Journeys, a series of odds and ends about the rest of Italy. Venice plays almost no role in this text, except for a description of returning to it on a steamer from Trieste in poor weather: “Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly from the water,—not like a queen, but like the grey, slovenly, bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was.”101 In poor lighting, the decaying city is revealed as a repulsive and hopeless slave—a dispiriting but not anomalous conclusion to my survey of Howells’s allusions to persons of color in his early travel writing about Italy. From this grim metaphor to Henry James’s previously cited 1883 comment about there being “a class of persons to whom Italians and Africans have almost equally little to say” is only a short step. The powerful attraction of Italy for so many significant figures in nineteenth-century American cultural life has often been characterized as an escapist fantasy, a dream of Arcady pursued by those troubled or disappointed by the harsh edges of a nation still grappling with a chaotic frontier and unruly institutions like democracy and slavery. This is surely true, and yet every fantasy brings with it the preoccupations that gave rise to it. Once in Italy, the more intellectually sophisticated Americans could hardly ignore the unfolding of the Risorgimento, which inevitably raised questions about and parallels to the condition of African Americans, and indeed two of the paramount leaders of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini and Garibaldi, had much to say in criticism of American slavery.102 The fantasy

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of finding truly distinctive “otherness” in Italy was also an important factor. Britain and France were still connected to the United States by so many historical bonds and contemporary cultural practices that American visitors were less likely to think deeply about issues of “difference” than they were in Italy. Melissa Dabakis has argued that white American expatriates in Italy appropriated for themselves a kind of colonial privilege and position, and of course that position reminded them in various ways of the privileges of whiteness they enjoyed at home.103 This comforted some and disturbed others, but both kinds of reactions led to the creation of the texts that have been considered here, especially those that play with the relationship of group identities. More particularly, American visitors to Venice and Rome encountered additional stimuli to reflect on these issues. In Venice it was the long history of a multiethnic society with ties to the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, and the survival of conspicuous works of art—and literature, in the case of Shakespeare’s Othello—that marked several different aspects

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of that diversity. In Rome traditional works of art and even sacred performance had an effect as well, especially those that helped frame Catholicism as directed toward a broad evangelical audience inclusive of people of color. In some cases, then, the dream of Arcady could morph into a dream of racial harmony, whereas in others (such as the Pesaro tomb) that dream could shift into the mode of nightmare. I have generally postponed in this chapter any exploration of the ways in which African Americans experienced Italy and Europe. (Frederick Douglass has been mentioned, but mostly in terms of his views about Italian politics, which were articulated well before he visited Italy itself.) As is well known, in the 1840s and 1850s many African American abolitionists traveled to and spoke publicly in Britain. Less familiar, however, is the extensive African American presence on the European continent during these decades, made up of tourists, adventurers, workers, and artists, some of whom became long-term expatriates. In the next chapter this phenomenon takes center stage.

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2 “A Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans” Eugène Warburg in Europe, 1853–1859

T

he subject of t hi s chapter, the mixed-race sculptor Eugène Warburg (1825/26–1859), may not have achieved a position of the first rank— he did not live long enough to make a really notable career—but it would be a mistake to underestimate his significance. Warburg is a very early instance of an American of African descent working in an emphatically “high” artistic form; sculpture in marble was perhaps the most elevated visual medium of the mid-nineteenth century in the United States. He may have been the first African American visual artist to become an expatriate in Europe—and his departure from the United States may well have been prompted, at least in part, by the same discriminatory obstacles that led so many later African American artists to follow his example. He was known to and supported by a wide range of influential political and cultural figures, encompassing both virulently pro-slavery and radically antislavery individuals. Warburg’s image of an African American character from the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe marks him as connected to the central political/cultural controversies of the 1850s, not only in the United States but also in Europe. Warburg’s story is one that links art, abolition, and varied conceptions of racial identity in a surprisingly intricate transatlantic

setting. This chapter seeks to bring together what is currently known of his life and art, from his birth as a slave in New Orleans to his premature death in his early thirties in Rome, with an emphasis on his final years (1853– 59) in Europe. I also consider to what extent Warburg’s European career might be reflected and/or paralleled in several subsequent works of American fiction. Warburg is often (though very briefly) cited as a groundbreaking but ultimately obscure predecessor of the much better known Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844/45– 1907), a sculptor of African and Native American descent who reached Italy in 1865 and settled in Rome in 1866, remaining there for at least two decades.1 The two sculptors would never have met, but it is easy to imagine that both Lewis and her white abolitionist patrons were aware of Warburg’s experience. Though many aspects of Lewis’s long and fascinating career remain to be clarified, in recent years her life and work have been treated in some detail and with considerable sophistication. A full account of Edmonia Lewis lies beyond the scope of the present study, though naturally she must play a significant part at several points in my analysis. In contrast to Lewis, however, Warburg and his career have been much neglected. Warburg may be cited in most histories of African American art and in 31

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various reference works, but very little of substance is to be found in most of these sources, which often merely repeat earlier and sometimes incorrect information.2 Warburg and Lewis, it should also be emphasized, were not the only African American visual artists in Europe in the mid-1800s. Warburg’s fellow New Orleanian Florville Foy (1820–1903), also a marble worker, appears to have accompanied his French father on a brief trip to Paris in the 1830s, while he was still in his teens, and in 1831 and again in 1837 the painter Julien Hudson (1811–1844, also of New Orleans) spent a few months in Paris as well.3 In 1840 the Philadelphia artist Robert Douglass was in London, copying paintings at the National Gallery, though it is less likely Warburg knew of this.4 The painter Robert Duncanson traveled widely in Europe for seven months in 1853 and made another visit to England after the Civil War.5

ear ly l i f e

The most reliable modern summary of what is known about Warburg is found in Charles Edwards O’Neill’s “Fine Arts and Literature: Nineteenth Century Louisiana Black Artists and Authors,” of 1979.6 O’Neill depends in part on Bertram Korn’s well-researched 1969 study of Jews in early New Orleans,7 and O’Neill’s information is ably recapitulated and somewhat augmented in Patricia Brady’s four essays of 1989–94.8 In addition to New Orleans archival and city-directory information about Warburg and his family (best consulted in O’Neill and Korn), there are also five useful contemporary pieces (1850–59) in New Orleans newspapers (the Picayune, the Daily Crescent, and the Bee / L’Abeille [the English and French versions of a similar publication]); all but one of these notices report on Warburg once he had gone to Europe.9 To these hometown sources can be added a short 1857 piece from a very different publication, the Art Journal, an important

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and widely read London periodical; two fascinating articles from an American newspaper in Paris; and briefer notices from two further American newspapers, as well as some census and ship’s manifest material.10 There are also four valuable passages by white American travelers in Europe detailing encounters with Warburg between 1855 and 1857; only one of these has previously been noted in print by modern scholars. Finally, a brief biography appears in Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes’s 1911 book about notable New Orleanians of color.11 Desdunes was born in 1849, so he would hardly have known Warburg, but he is likely to have spoken with Warburg’s younger brother, Daniel (and Daniel’s son, usually known as Daniel Jr.), and his information may be taken as an indication of a local oral tradition. Desdunes must also have been familiar with a lengthy posthumous appreciation of Warburg published in L’Union, an African American newspaper in New Orleans, in December of 1862.12 To Desdunes goes the considerable credit for the survival of Eugène Warburg’s name and achievements in modern times. Eugène’s father, the German Jew Daniel Warburg (1789–1860), was one of a numerous family of this surname who came to some prominence in the town of Altona and the nearby city of Hamburg during the eighteenth century. Eventually quite a number of Warburgs emigrated to London and the United States, where they made a major mark in banking and other professions. The best-known Warburg in the arts was Aby (1866–1929), an Italophile who was a pioneering scholar of Renaissance art and culture and the founder of the Warburg Institute (now at the University of London). It would seem that Daniel Warburg was the first of his family to come to the United States; he left the Hamburg area and settled in New Orleans by 1821. Some years later he made a public declaration that he practiced no religion.13 None of the earlier sources on Eugène (including Desdunes) mentions his Jewish heritage.14

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Daniel was a commission merchant and real-estate investor. Quite affluent in the early 1830s, he lost most of his fortune in the panic of 1837, was in bankruptcy in 1839–41, and never recovered his wealth. (In the late 1830s Daniel also began to promote himself as an inventor, though there is more than a touch of delusion in his self-advertisements.)15 Soon after his arrival in New Orleans, Daniel took an enslaved mistress—perhaps the young daughter of another woman he also owned—who was known as Marie Rose Blondeau (ca. 1804–1837?). Marie Rose and her mother, Venus, came from Santiago, Cuba, and perhaps originally from Haiti. Daniel and Marie Rose had five children, and by 1837 (the year of her early death) she must have been free, as she then owned a slave herself. Eugène was the oldest child, born in 1825 or early 1826, and at the age of four years, in 1830, he was manumitted. (The other children, including Joseph Daniel [later just called Daniel], who was born in 1836, were apparently born free.)16 At Eugène’s manumission, his father and the ambitious French immigrant Pierre Soulé (1801–1870; in New Orleans from 1825) served as guarantors for the boy’s future solvency and pledged to provide him with a trade. That trade was marble cutting, and Eugène clearly took to it. He received instruction from Philippe Garbeille, a French sculptor who had studied in 1838 with the famous Danish master Bertel Thorvaldsen, the dominant neoclassical sculptor in Rome.17 Garbeille was already in New Orleans in 1841 or 1842 and may have remained there off and on until the early 1850s; he had made a bust of Soulé, and since Soulé had served as Daniel Warburg’s lawyer, participated in a real-estate transaction with him, and acted as a sort of godfather to the boy, the choice of Garbeille as a teacher is understandable.18 In 1849 Eugène set up his own shop, on St. Peter Street, and by 1850 he had moved the shop to St. Louis Street, where marble cutters were concentrated. Apart from the black and white squares of the pavement

of St. Louis Cathedral (fig. 13), it has proved difficult to attribute any particular works to Warburg in New Orleans.19 One presumes funerary monuments were a staple. Desdunes writes of busts of “generals, magistrates, and other notables,” and of masterpieces in the old cemeteries of the city; but as Eugène’s brother and nephew, both called Daniel, were longtime marble cutters in the city after his departure, it is hard to feel sure that Desdunes is absolutely correct in his claims.20 An 1862 posthumous appreciation of Warburg speaks of busts made of his friends in glazed terracotta.21 Desdunes does, more particularly, speak of a single block carved with two angels on a common base, which made the young man’s reputation, though the patron who ordered it did not claim it, and the work was eventually sold to one Panniston.22 In December 1850, at Hall’s Gilding Shop on Canal Street, Warburg raffled a statue he had carved of Ganymede as cupbearer to Jupiter; the estimated value was $500, but no record of the result of the raffle has been found, and nothing is known today of the work.23 As this was a favored subject of Thorvaldsen’s (see, for example, the work in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1817–29 [fig. 14]), the influence of Garbeille might be inferred, though this artist had left New Orleans in 1848.24 In 1850, however, another notable European sculptor arrived in the city. The Milan-born Achille Perelli (1822–1891) had been a student of Pietro Galli (1804–1877), one of Thorvaldsen’s students and closest associates; Galli may well have worked on one or more of Thorvaldsen’s six Ganymede sculptures.25 One of Thorvaldsen’s sculptures of Ganymede had visited America, having been exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1839.26 Warburg, then, might have had multiple means of hearing about Thorvaldsen’s images of this mythological subject. In any case, Warburg’s Ganymede, even if it did not sell, was admired: the New Orleans Bee (December 13, 1850) wrote of “this exquisite specimen of sculpture . . . by

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f ig ur e 13 Eugène Warburg, marble floor, St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, ca. 1850. Photo: The Charles L. Franck Studio Collection at The Historic New Orleans Collection, acc. no. 1979.325.3456.

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a young Creole of our city” and opined that the artist, with further study, would “attain deserved excellence.”27 One might wonder whether the raffle was already part of a plan to raise money to cross the Atlantic. Desdunes affirms that Warburg’s racial status held him back in his New Orleans career, and Brady, on relatively slight evidence, suggests he was no longer comfortable in antebellum New Orleans.28 The ascendancy of Achille Perelli, who quickly established a thriving shop, may also have limited Warburg’s opportunities for advancement.29 But he must certainly also have had more positive reasons for thinking about a European sojourn. In the middle of the nineteenth century ambitious American sculptors typically sought to study

in Italy and travel in Europe, and their sponsors and patrons often helped them to do so. Warburg’s father was European born; his teacher Garbeille was French and had studied in Rome; Perelli had an even deeper connection to contemporary sculpture in Rome; and Warburg’s father’s associate Pierre Soulé was French and was now an extremely influential political figure (a U.S. senator from 1849 to 1853, when he resigned to become the U.S. minister to Spain).30 Furthermore, the experience of another New Orleanian of color, the writer Victor Séjour (1817–1874), may have been well known to Warburg. Séjour’s wealthy parents, both free, were of mixed race; he was sent to Paris at nineteen and almost immediately published a vivid short story

f ig ur e 1 4 Bertel Thorvaldsen, Ganymede and the Eagle, 1817–29. Marble, 88.3 × 47 × 117.8 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art. Gift of the Morse Foundation, 66.9. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art.

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(“Le mulâtre,” 1837) on the theme of slavery. He soon shifted to drama and built a successful career as a mainstream playwright in Paris in the 1840s and 1850s.31 Finally, it should be recalled that two other New Orleanian visual artists of color, Florville Foy (a marble worker) and Julien Hudson (a painter) had made brief visits to Paris during the 1830s.

depart ur e f or eur ope

To finance his transatlantic voyage, Eugène and his now impoverished father turned to one of the few family assets that still remained. In a complicated legal transaction involving a “friendly” suit between father and son and in consultation with a group of free men of color charged with protecting the interests of the sculptor’s four younger siblings, Eugène was able to realize $252.36 from the sale of his long-deceased mother’s three slaves.32 That both Eugène and his mother had been born into slavery themselves only heightens the cruel and poignant irony of this transaction; in effect, his share of the sale was worth three-fifths of a human being—precisely the value assigned to each slave in the Constitution. The sculptor, in fact, did not quite wait for the cash to come through (in January of 1853) but departed New Orleans toward the end of November 1852. Warburg presumably settled in Paris. He brought with him at least one letter of recommendation, which has survived. The New Orleans architect Alexander H. Sampson, with whom Warburg had worked on the cathedral floor, recommended him to the Parisian business agent Eugène Lafaure. The letter was written on November 23, 1852, and appears to have been presented by Warburg to Lafaure on January 21, 1853: I send to you a young man from New Orleans who would like to live in Paris for some time, this young man is an artist, he is a sculptor by profession; 36

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that which he knows is derived only from his own intelligence; he would like to strengthen himself in his art, by working at a statue maker’s[.] He is not looking to receive any reimbursement for his work, he has some funds, the fruit of his work, and he only wants to strengthen his art, he will also ask you to let him know a hotel where he can live cheaply. I pray you then, my dear Monsieur Lafaure, to do me this little service, this young man is of irreproachable conduct, and he possesses to the highest degree a love of his art; it’s thus by these two qualities that I recommend him to you.33 On the back of the letter, in pencil, are some budget figures that may have been Warburg’s; they include professional study, lodging, food, and clothing, and total 2,200 francs, a considerable sum. He did, at any rate, have enough to visit London twice in 1853.34 Quite a few mixed-race Louisianans were to be found in Paris at this juncture. The remarkable David Dorr (1827/28–1872?) was a light-skinned enslaved valet who traveled in Europe and beyond with his New Orleans master, Cornelius Fellowes, in 1851–52 and then (after fleeing to the North) wrote a memoir (A Colored Man Round the World [1858]) of his European journey.35 Late in 1851 Dorr met a wealthy “quadroon” tailor in Paris called Cordevoille, with whom his master and other New Orleans whites were eager to socialize.36 From men such as Cordevoille and Séjour, Warburg would at least have received advice and companionship. At some point he entered the studio of François Jouffroy (1806–1882), a respected sculptor who had studied in Rome (1826–35?); Jouffroy later became a professor at the École des beauxarts, where he taught the young Augustus SaintGaudens. Jouffroy is described as Warburg’s teacher in a publication of May 1855.37

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The first sure confirmation I have of Warburg as settled in Paris is dated August 26, 1854, when the American celebrity dentist (!) Eleazar Parmly (1797– 1874) mentioned the sculptor in the odd rhyming couplets with which he recorded his European travels: Called with our Consul here, McRae, Eugene Warburg to see; A colored artist having skill Of very high degree. One modeled bust and plaster form, The two extremely fine; The head from nature, but the cast Was wholly his design All executed with the skill Of those who highest stand; A credit to the realm of art, And to his native land.38 The particular nature of these two works is made clearer in a March 7, 1855, article in the New Orleans Daily Picayune. Under the heading “Another American Sculptor,” the Picayune republished on its front page a notice of January 27 from an English-language Parisian paper called the American.39 In a preamble, the Picayune noted that Warburg had been studying in a “prominent atelier,” left unnamed. The text from the American (here entitled “A Visit to Mr. Warburg’s Studio”) runs as follows: At the very end of the rue des Martyrs, near the Barriere Montmartre, in a building destined to ateliers of sculptors, we found Mr. Warburg’s unpretending studio. The artist was not there, and we had to be our own cicerone. Among a number of plaster casts, the inmates of all ateliers of sculptors, the cast of a figure representing a boy about twelve years of age, in a sitting posture and playing with a crab,

attracted our notice. We found that the artist was engaged in producing it in marble. The figure of the boy, and position, is very natural, the proportions good, and the whole produces a very pleasing effect. We are curious to see this figure, sculptured in marble, which admits that beautiful finish and life like expression of feature and muscle. We observed also a bust in marble, intended, no doubt, for Mr. McRae, our Consul at Paris, whom it resembles strikingly. The plaster-cast figure of the boy and the marble bust show talent, and from what we have seen of the works of the artist, we have all reasons to believe that he will arrive at eminence. Mr. Warburg is modest; he feels that he has to study. He appreciates the works of the ancient and modern sculptors, and loses no time or occasion to perfect himself. The road to perfection is long and difficult, but perseverance, study, and a due consideration of the works of others, will surely lead to it. We have seen a photographic picture of the piece last referred to, certified as a correct one by our consul at Paris. The work would seem, though undoubtedly open to criticism, to be very creditable. Nothing is said of the artist’s race or family background in this appreciation, in contrast to Parmly’s reference to Warburg as a “colored artist.” It is an upbeat, encouraging account of the young sculptor, but it is followed (in a section not reprinted in the New Orleans Picayune) by an intensely invidious comparison between the excellence (artistic and personal) of Warburg and the fraudulence of a white American sculptor, Clark Mills. This segment begins: “Our young artist [Warburg] is not like the American Phydias, who sprung from the wild forests of the South, like Minerva, from the brain of Jupiter; who prides himself on never having seen a drawing school, nor a statue; that he never left

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his native home to study or to perfect his natural taste.” Mills (1810–1883) was rather older than Warburg and was not born and raised in the South, but his career as a sculptor began after he moved first to New Orleans and then to Charleston, where he thrived by making portraits of the local slaveholding elite.40 He never traveled to Europe; by the 1850s he had set up shop in Washington, D.C., where he became known for a series of equestrian statues of Andrew Jackson. The writer goes on to characterize Mills as a “crude” and untutored artisan, while such men as [Hiram] Powers, [Thomas] Crawford and others who have established their reputation as true artists, are not thought worthy of the nation’s confidence. We are too apt to mistake skill for talent, the art of imitation is natural to all races of men. Carving is practiced by the most primitive people; the specimens of carvings of the most hideous savages show skill. Our red-skinned aborigines embellish their tobacco pipes with figures in various attitudes; the Mexican Indians excel even in modeling, yet these natural artists have not the remotest idea of drawing or taste, and their attempts on the Buffalo skins are far inferior to their attempts in sculpture. Mills is thus abused as a primitive, a white American who has practically “gone native,” someone who (unlike Warburg) has foolishly refused to polish his style by exposure to the European tradition. Some aspects of this curious jeremiad may be explained by its probable author, the American’s publisher, Charles Lewis Fleischmann. Fleischmann was born in Amberg (Franconia), Germany, in 1806 and, after a solid education in agricultural technology, emigrated to the United States in 1832. He traveled widely there and soon settled in Washington, D.C., where he worked for the U.S. Patent Office until 1845. In that 38

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year he left for Europe to help popularize Morse’s telegraph, and he then turned to writing a series of books (in German) encouraging German farmers and skilled workers to come to the United States. From 1849 to 1853 he was the American consul in Stuttgart, and in 1855 he received several appointments as commissioner (from New York and Indiana) to the Exposition universelle in Paris, where he seems to have spent at least a year. During this time he also apparently wrote for Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune about the exposition.41 Though not especially sensitive about American slavery (he tried to persuade German farmers to overcome their distaste for the institution and settle in the American South), he was often appalled by the lack of technical knowledge and planning in American agriculture and consistently argued in various official reports that American farmers had much to learn from scientific advances in Europe. The harsh critique of Mills as refusing to learn from a more sophisticated European tradition would make sense in this light, as would a preference for Warburg’s more polished style, and Fleischmann would probably also have been sympathetic to Warburg because of his German heritage.42 Under Fleischman’s control, from late 1854 to early 1856, the American did not really comment on the slavery question back in the United States, though a sympathetic short biography of Alexandre Dumas père does include comments about his African “blood” and slightly African appearance.43 By March 1856, shortly after Fleischmann had given up control of the newspaper, it began to be filled with explicitly pro-slavery pieces, including an attack on Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Warburg is no longer mentioned.44 The Exposition universelle, one of the earliest of the ambitious international fairs that were a key component of later nineteenth-century European and American culture, had probably drawn Fleischmann to

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Paris, and it played a crucial role in the development of Warburg’s career. From May to November of 1855, four of Warburg’s sculptures appeared in the major Parisian and indeed European art exhibition of the year: the Salon, which in 1855—exceptionally—was combined with the Exposition universelle.45 The main section of the printed catalogue lists three sculptures: a fisher-boy in plaster (no. 731), a bust in marble (no. 732), and a bust in plaster (no. 733).46 The bust in marble may well have been that of the American consul in Paris Duncan K. McRae (1820–1888, of Fayetteville, North Carolina; described above and mentioned in Parmly’s poem),47 and the “fisher-boy” was presumably the boy with crab—evidently the marble version was not yet complete. Though one might imagine that the subject of a youth with a sea creature might have been prompted by Warburg’s early years in a city famous for its seafood, the “fisher-boy” subject was extremely popular with midcentury French sculptors such as Duret, Rude, and Carpeaux.48 A supplement to the catalogue lists a fourth work by Warburg: a portrait bust of the U.S. minister to France, in marble.49 This is certainly the bust of John Young Mason of Virginia (1799–1859), who occupied that post from 1853 to 1859; this handsome object (fig. 15) is now in the collection of the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond.50 Until recently, the bust of Mason was regarded as the only figurative work by Warburg to have survived. The cost of Mason’s bust was paid by a subscription of sixty American expatriates and visitors to Paris, who then donated the sculpture to Mason’s wife and arranged for its temporary display at the Exposition universelle, on September 1, 1855.51 Among the sixty rather distinguished subscribers was Charles L. Fleischman, the publisher of the American. As the Salon part of the Exposition universelle alone consisted of thousands of works and the American artists were few, it is not surprising that Warburg’s

four sculptures were only very occasionally mentioned in print by visitors. The reactionary critic Antoine Etex published a short book of criticism of the art at the 1855 Salon, which essentially ignored the American works on display, but at the end of this text he turned to American art as a whole, which he sarcastically dismissed, except for the work of Hiram Powers.52 The final paragraphs of this section consist of an intense defense of slavery and white supremacy and an attack on abolitionism. He does not mention Warburg. Another widely read French critic, the aged neoclassical painter Étienne-Jean Delécluze, does cite the two American sculptors whose works were on display, Warburg and Richard Greenough. He notes Warburg’s Young Fisherman Playing with a Crab and two busts and remarks that both sculptors’ creations are “not without merit; but they so visibly manifest the character they have received from the French School that except for the names and nationality of their authors, there is nothing truly American in this consignment of works.”53 Warburg, at least, might not have been disappointed by that assimilation into French art. One wonders what Greenough, the younger brother of the more famous sculptor Horatio Greenough (d. 1853), who had puzzled his New England friends with a crudely intemperate essay on African American inferiority (with some anti-Semitic passages added in as well) in his 1852 memoirs, must have made of a coexhibitor who was of both black and Jewish heritage.54 Both Warburg and Richard Greenough again appear together, though without any particular comment, in Horace Greeley’s broad and generally positive review of the Salon, published in his own New-York Daily Tribune of June 18, 1855.55 Greeley was in Paris for some months and was in contact with both Charles Fleischmann (who apparently wrote for the Tribune on technology at the exposition) and John Young Mason as well as other members of the American legation there, who assisted

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f ig ur e 15 Eugène Warburg, John Young Mason, 1855. Marble. Virginia Museum of History and Culture, 1927.21. Photo: Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

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him during his brief imprisonment due to a suit by an aggrieved French sculptor whose work had been damaged in transit to an exhibition in New York.56 Given these interconnections, it is perfectly possibly Greeley met Warburg, but it has not been proven.

pier r e so ul é

The portraits of John Young Mason and Duncan McRae, minister and consul, strongly suggest that Warburg had been adopted as a kind of semiofficial artist by the American government representatives in Paris, and it is likely that this was due to the intervention of Pierre Soulé. Soulé had begun his adult life, in Paris, as a radical, antiroyalist journalist—this part of his career is recorded in the memoirs of his fellow radical Alexandre Dumas père. Dumas was the son of a revolutionary-era general who was himself the child of a French aristocratic planter in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and his enslaved mistress. Threatened with imprisonment by the Bourbon government in 1825 for an article critical of French policy toward Haiti, Soulé fled first to Britain and then to Haiti itself, carrying a letter of recommendation from the famous antislavery and republican French cleric Abbé Grégoire (1750–1831) to the mixed-race Haitian president, Jean-Pierre Boyer. After a brief stay in Haiti—Soulé later said that his visit there had cured him of “dreams of liberty”—he came to the United States and settled in New Orleans in November of 1825. By 1830, when he served as a guarantor of the very young Eugène’s manumission, he was close to the Warburg family. In the 1840s he rose in the Democratic Party, and in 1847 and again in 1849–53 he served as a U.S. senator from Louisiana.57 He was close to the pro-slavery leader John Calhoun but was admired even by some of his abolitionist opponents for his oratorical skills, and there was evidently a hope (not really to be fulfilled) that his early progressive

views might reemerge. On December 31, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to the antislavery stalwart Charles Sumner, senator from Massachusetts: Can it be that no man of honor—no man thirsting for immortal fame will yet rise from the South—and win himself eternal glory by being the leader of a movement for universal freedom—Can such a man as Soulé—I know not if I have rightly conceived of him, but I think of him as an impersonation of nobility and chivalry, can he be willing to be the tool of tyranny and the leader of despotism—when Freedom is holding up an unfading crown to be worn by some deliverer? What a glory would be that Southern man’s who should liberate his country and the world from his shame!58 This speculation may have been prompted by Soulé’s noteworthy intervention a few weeks earlier in the rescue of the illegally enslaved freeman Solomon Northup. In Northup’s famous autobiographical account, Twelve Years a Slave, he has this to say about Soulé: “Senator Soule especially interested himself in the matter, insisting, in forcible language, that it was the duty and interest of every planter in his State to aid in restoring me to freedom, and trusted the sentiments of honor and justice in the bosom of every citizen of the commonwealth would enlist him at once in my behalf.”59 One wonders whether Soulé’s connection to Warburg—just then en route to Europe—had any impact on his assistance to Northup. From 1853 to 1855 Soulé was in Madrid as the U.S. minister to Spain, but he visited Paris in the fall of 1853 and the fall of 1854, and he had occasion to work closely with both Mason and McRae.60 By the 1850s Soulé, ever more vigorously pro-slavery and imperialist, was an important figure in the Young America movement, which sought to expand the

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United States into Hispanic areas bordering the Caribbean as a means of introducing new slave states and countering the influence of Northern abolitionism. Soulé’s plan to buy (or seize) Cuba from the Spanish was advanced by a document known as the Ostend Manifesto, which was prepared during several days in October of 1854 in that Belgian town and then in Aachen, not far away across the Prussian border.61 Soulé and Mason were joined there by James Buchanan, then the American minister to Great Britain, who may have drafted much of the manifesto itself; McRae’s job was to carry the document back to Washington.62 It is even possible that Warburg accompanied these statesmen to Ostend—Desdunes in 1911 reports that the sculptor had made a brief stay in Belgium—but it is unlikely any work on the portraits was done in Ostend, as the diplomats were quite busy.63 As word of the manifesto’s contents got out, a political scandal arose, and the planned annexation of Cuba came to naught. Warburg may have been fascinated by all this, especially given his mother’s Cuban background, but he may also have been perplexed to find himself still enmeshed with the issue of slavery: the sale of family slaves helped him reach Europe, and the pro-slavery scheme hatched at Ostend may have encouraged the commission of the busts, as Mason and even McRae may have imagined that their role in the manifesto would make them especially worthy of sculptural commemoration. In April 1855, as the collapse of the plan became clear, Soulé resigned his post and returned to the United States, and this constituted a potential setback for Warburg. By the end of the year, however, he was hard at work on a different sort of project, one with the kind of mythological/erotic content that harks back to his early Ganymede. Once again, the source of this information is the American, at this point (November 10, 1855) still published by Charles L. Fleischmann, who is also likely the author: 42

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“Another Visit to Mr. Warburg’s Studio” In a former number of our paper, we have alluded to Mr. Warburg, the sculptor (a native of New Orleans), and to his productions. Lately we have had occasion to make another visit to his modest studio, and found him intently occupied in modeling a figure,—the representation of a female, ornamenting her hair with the genial grape from which Bacchus pressed the heavenly juice. She is of the size of life, in a standing position, with one arm raised over her head in the act of embellishing her floating locks; in the other hand she holds flowers and fruit. The attitude is easy and graceful, the expression of the face pleasing, and as far as the work is finished it evinces a close study of human nature; all the movements of the muscles are delicately indicated, and the work bids fair to be a master-piece of sculpture. Mr. Warburg is fully aware of the difficult task he has undertaken. He studied Nature, and the works of ancient and modern artists in the Louvre— the School of Art; he studied also at the Great Exhibition, and he drew his inspirations from standard models, each recommended by some perfection. The lineaments of this youthful female figure, are very exquisite. The bold chisel of the artist has well rendered the expression of the beautiful,—the bewitching smiles of conscious beauty. Buoyant life seems to animate every feature of his charming creation. A few weeks more and the figure will be ready to be cast and wrought into marble; and we hope next Spring to see the completion of this conception of a Southern genius. The description does not specify whether this bacchante was nude or clothed, though it is probably significant that limbs and muscles, rather than garments,

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are mentioned. This kind of erotic subject was common both in French rococo art and in the works of Thorvaldsen in the early nineteenth century and remained common into the 1860s in sculptures by, for example, Carpeaux and Carrier-Belleuse.64 It would not have seemed out of place in Paris in the 1850s, but it might have raised some eyebrows back in New Orleans, especially given Warburg’s racial position there. It suggests that Warburg was contemplating at least a slightly different direction for his career. We do not know if this work was ever rendered in marble, and the American, with a new and racist editor, never returned to Warburg’s studio.

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In 1856, however, Warburg began to pursue a radically different career plan. He and/or his work had somehow caught the eye of Harriet Elizabeth Georgiana Howard Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland (1806–1868). The duchess, an intimate of Queen Victoria’s and a fervent ally of American abolitionists, was enormously wealthy, culturally sophisticated, and influential. She and her husband, the second Duke of Sutherland, owned the most lavish town house in London, which contained an extensive art collection.65 Exactly how she learned of Warburg is a mystery; neither the American nor the Salon / Exposition universelle catalogue had said anything of his racial background, and in any case she reportedly visited the sculptor’s studio at 66 rue des Martyrs before the exposition opened—that is, before May 15, 1855. Given her antislavery views, she would have had little association with men like Soulé, Mason, or McRae. Probably Warburg himself took the initiative. Her antislavery position was widely known, as was that of her brother, the Earl of Carlisle, who had written the preface to several early British editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.66 Warburg may also have learned that the

duchess’s husband, the second duke, had in fact commissioned Thorvaldsen’s most famous Ganymede (fig. 14), which had long been displayed in a place of honor in the couple’s London residence.67 However he managed to attract the duchess’s attention, in doing so Warburg had embarked on a profoundly new course in terms of patronage and the overall direction of his career. To understand what happened next, it is easiest simply to quote a long passage from the 1874 memoirs of the wealthy New York lawyer Maunsell Bradhurst Field (1822–1875), who served as one of the three New York State commissioners (with Charles L. Fleischmann) to the 1855 Exposition universelle and as the president of the board of all U.S. commissioners to that exhibition, among other posts. Late in 1855 (perhaps after the exposition closed, on November 15), he returned to London: I had not been there very long, when I received a call one day from a mulatto sculptor from New Orleans, who had exhibited some very creditable and promising works at the recent Paris Exposition. By some chance the Duchess of Sutherland had been attracted to his studio in Paris before the opening of the Exposition, and it was indirectly through her agency that my attention had been originally called to him. I am not quite certain of his name, but think that it was Warberg [sic]. The poor, foolish fellow, having exhausted his means, had come over to London to find his Duchess, hoping that she would relieve his wants and give him the advantage of her protection. Upon going to Sutherland House, he was informed that the Duchess was then in Scotland, and would not return to town for several weeks. He also learned that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe was with her Grace. In his disappointment he looked me up, having, I believe, not a single other acquaintance

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in the great city. To make matters worse for him, he had brought with him a charming little quadroon wife, of whose existence I had hitherto known nothing. They were residing in a wretchedly squalid place on the Surrey side, and were in imminent danger of starvation. I did the little that I could to relieve their immediate wants, and gave him an order for a bust. I had not the honor of Mrs. Stowe’s acquaintance, nor have I ever since met the lady. But I took the liberty of immediately writing her a full account of my protégé, knowing that it would be laid under the Duchess’s eye. At that time I had some doubts about Mrs. Stowe’s sincerity in the cause of the negroes. I was not sure she was any thing more than a writer of sensational fiction. An answer soon came, to the effect that the Duchess and herself would be in London in a few days, when the matter should have attention. When these ladies did return, they associated with themselves in their benevolent purpose Lady Byron, and, for aught I know to the contrary, some others. Shortly thereafter they took a nice suite of apartments for Warberg, as I shall call him, and his wife, in the artists’ quarter, on one of the streets leading into Bedford Square, paid the rent in advance, and furnished them with every comfort. After a further interval of time, Warberg informed me that the same ladies had arranged to send him to Italy, that he might have the opportunity of pursuing his studies in the studio of a famous sculptor. Never since that time have I doubted Mrs. Stowe’s sincerity in the great work of African emancipation.68 This fascinating account requires several clarifications. Although Field here claims that he first learned of Warburg through the duchess, this is unlikely. In the fall of 1854 Field arrived in Paris with no particular plan of action, but upon making the acquaintance of

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the American envoy, John Young Mason, he was unexpectedly offered a position as the interim secretary of the American legation there, which he accepted. (Field was at this time enrolled in the Democratic Party, to which Mason belonged, though he later served in the Treasury under Lincoln and became a Republican.) In his memoirs Field provides an extended characterization of Mason, whom he seems to have liked. His main activity during his few months of diplomatic service was to carry the diplomatic dispatch dashing the hopes of the writers of the Ostend Manifesto to Pierre Soulé in Madrid and then return to Paris bearing Soulé’s letter of resignation. He befriended Soulé as well and enjoyed the weeks spent in Madrid as he waited for Soulé to decide on his course of action. In another passage of his memoirs, related to the Ostend Manifesto, he also mentions Duncan K. McRae.69 It is thus far more likely that Field met Warburg through his association with these men (and perhaps Charles Fleischmann) than through the Duchess of Sutherland. Field’s is the first name on the list of subscribers for Warburg’s marble bust of Mason, which was displayed with others of the sculptor’s works at the Exposition universelle, where Field served as president of the American commissioners. Warburg’s ties to Field, Fleischmann, Soulé, and Mason were no doubt vital to his appearance at the exposition. The identity of Warburg’s wife is not as straightforward. New Orleans documents seem to indicate that Warburg was already married when he left his native city, to a German immigrant by the name of Catherine Haselbach. Catherine was five years older than Eugène, and together they had a daughter, Lorenza. There is, however, no record of Catherine’s having left New Orleans, and from 1871 to 1875 the census locates her there and describes her as Eugène’s widow. Field’s “charming little quadroon wife” is therefore probably a different person, and indeed a later Italian source names his wife as Louise Ernestine Rosbò. We do not know

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where they met. Yet another account of Warburg’s matrimonial history asserts that he married a local woman during his stay in Florence in 1857, but this cannot be squared with Field’s narrative of 1855.70 These puzzling and contradictory details suggest something of the complexity of life for a transatlantic artist of color, and perhaps a need for both Warburg and those who followed and reported on his career to reconstrue his identity periodically. Finally, it should be noted that Field’s account refers to a commission he gave Warburg—probably a bust of Field himself—but we do not know if it was carried out. (A later and rather vague account of Warburg’s work in England includes a reference to “busts in marble of many learned Englishmen.”)71 But Field’s modest contribution to Warburg’s support was far exceeded by that of the triumvirate of the Duchess of Sutherland, Stowe, and Lady Byron. These three women had in common their intense support for the abolition of slavery in the United States, but the two British subjects, Sutherland and Byron, were not close friends, though each was an intimate of Stowe. Anna Isabella, Lady Byron (1792–1860), the poet’s widow, had attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Conference in London and was one of the few women incorporated in Benjamin Haydon’s celebrated group portrait of the event.72 Stowe, touring England in 1853 in the glow of the fame she had procured with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, met Byron, and their friendship deepened when Stowe returned to Britain in the summer of 1856.73 (In 1869, well after Lady Byron’s death, Stowe published a defense of Anna Isabella’s behavior toward her husband, the poet, which revealed to the world Lady Byron’s affirmation that her distance toward him had been caused by Lord Byron’s incestuous relations with his half-sister.)74 Stowe had also met and befriended the Duchess of Sutherland in 1853. In 1852, at her palatial London

residence, the duchess had launched the Stafford House Address, a famous antislavery petition soon signed by many more than half a million British women, and on May 8, 1853, Stowe was presented with the completed document in a moving ritual held in the same grand dwelling.75 (On May 12 the vituperatively racist and anti-abolition Thomas Carlyle conflated Harriet Stowe and Harriet [Leveson-Gower] Sutherland by referring to Stafford House as “Aunt Harriet’s Cabin.”)76 In September 1856 Stowe spent several weeks at the Sutherlands’ Highland home, Dunrobin Castle, where she received an eager note from Lady Byron.77 Stowe was back in London, but only briefly, in late October and early November, and this is the most likely period for a meeting with Warburg. The American author already had some experience in promoting a person of color in the arts: in 1855 she had written a one-person dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, called The Christian Slave, for the relatively light-skinned African American actress Mary Webb (1828–1859), who performed it to mixed reviews in the United States and, in 1856, in England. On July 28, 1856, shortly before Stowe had arrived in England, Webb had performed this work at Stafford House, with her hostess, the Duchess of Sutherland, in the audience.78 Stowe apparently had something similar in mind, allowing for the difference in medium, for Warburg. Maunsell Field’s memoir, however, alludes to no works to be produced by Warburg in exchange for the financial support of the three women, but only to the bust that Field himself commissioned. Desdunes, in his 1911 account of Warburg’s life, writes that “in London he met the Duchess of S——, who engaged him to make some bas-reliefs representing scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which took a year to complete.79 As Desdunes’s sources include most probably Eugène’s brother Daniel, one ought not to take this claim lightly, yet no such work has surfaced, nor is there any other early

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citation of it. Though the relief format would have been unusual, illustrations of the novel certainly proliferated from the moment of its publication. One can imagine the Duchess of Sutherland desiring such a work, rendering the popular literary narrative in a high-art medium, perhaps as an ornament for the classicizing interior of Stafford House. What is now clear, however, is that late in 1856 Warburg did produce a work (figs. 16–17) depicting characters from Stowe’s second “slavery novel,” Dred. Desdunes’s reference to the Uncle Tom reliefs is most probably a misunderstood reflection of the Dred work. One of Desdunes’s sources was a posthumous appreciation of Warburg in an 1862 New Orleans newspaper, where it was affirmed that while in London Warburg was working “on statues of the main characters in one of the books of this lady [Mrs. Stowe].”80 It is easy to understand why Desdunes might have incorrectly assumed that the book in question was the still-famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin rather than the by-then-obscure Dred. uncle tiff

The key early source for the sculpture of Uncle Tiff is an anonymous short piece in the well-known London periodical Art Journal (September 1857, 295): Statuette of “Old Tiff.”—A statuette of much merit and considerable interest has been recently produced by Mr. Alderman Copeland, in statuary porcelain; it is the work of Mr. Warburg, an American sculptor of “mixed blood,” an artist of great ability and general intelligence, who is now resident in England. The group represents “Old Tiff,” the hero of Mrs. Stowe’s latest novel, nursing the little maiden who is the heroine of the story; and at the same time rocking a cradle with his feet and busied with his hands. It is a striking work, and cannot fail

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to find favour with the tens of thousands who in England, and in the United States, sympathise with the subjects whom Mrs. Stowe has pictured with so much feeling and pathos. The accomplished authoress has criticised this group of Mr. Warburg’s, in a letter which we have perused:—“It is,” she writes, “beautifully truthful, and shows how far the expression of love and fidelity may go in giving beauty to the coarsest and plainest features.” Certainly the sculptor has exaggerated rather than mellowed the peculiarities of the African type. Fortunately, this work survives, though because of its unfamiliar medium, a reproducible ceramic known as Parian or statuary porcelain, it has escaped the attention of most scholars of nineteenth-century American sculpture.81 It is inscribed with Warburg’s signature, the year 1856, and the words “Uncle Tiff ”—not “Old Tiff ” as in the passage above. The object is invaluable in helping to understand the trajectory of Warburg’s career and its intersection with the interests of both Stowe and the Duchess of Sutherland. The sculpture is twelve inches high and depicts one of the primary characters of Stowe’s Dred, the older male slave Tiff, embracing the little white boy Teddy, who sits in the slave’s lap (figs. 16–17).82 In nearly all respects, the sculpture adheres closely to Stowe’s text, in the passage in chapter 8 where Tiff and Teddy’s poor white family are introduced: Beside her [sc., Teddy’s mother’s] bed was sitting an old negro, in whose close-curling wool age had begun to sprinkle flecks of white. His countenance presented, physically, one of the most uncomely specimens of negro features; and would have been positively frightful, had it not been redeemed by an expression of cheerful kindliness which beamed from it. His face was of ebony blackness, with a

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f ig ur e 1 6 Eugène Warburg, Uncle Tiff, 1856. Parian, 30 cm high. Private collection, New Orleans. Photo: Ray Palmer.

f ig ur e 1 7 Eugène Warburg, Uncle Tiff, 1856 (fig. 16), detail.

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wide, upturned nose, a mouth of portentous size, guarded by clumsy lips, revealing teeth which a shark might have envied. The only fine feature was his large, black eyes, which, at the present, were concealed by a huge pair of plated spectacles, placed very low upon his nose, and through which he was directing his sight upon a child’s stocking, that he was busily darning. At his foot was a rude cradle, made of a gumtree log, hollowed out into a trough, and wadded by various old fragments of flannel, in which slept a very young infant. Another child, of about three years of age, was sitting on the negro’s knee, busily playing with some pine-cones and mosses. The figure of the old negro was low and stooping; and he wore, pinned round his shoulders, a half-handkerchief or shawl of red flannel, arranged much as an old woman would have arranged it. One or two needles, with coarse, black thread dangling to them, were stuck in on his shoulder; and, as he busily darned on the little stocking, he kept up a kind of droning intermixture of chanting and talking to the child on his knee. “So, ho, Teddy!—bub dar!—my man!—sit still!—’cause yer ma’s sick, and sister’s gone for medicine. Dar, Tiff ’ll sing to his little man.”83 Though color, especially of skin, is absent in the white, marble-like sculpture, most other features from the text are apparent: the cradle (on whose abbreviated front end Tiff rests his foot), the eyeglasses (not worn, but resting on his knee), the darning work, the shawl, the emphatically African features of the man. Stowe describes his visage almost as a kind of frightening caricature. Warburg is less exaggerated in his approach, concealing Tiff ’s teeth, and the figure’s age is mostly expressed in his receding hairline. In the sculpture Teddy has no pinecones or mosses in his little hands,

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but a small crude doll resting on the ground behind the child may be Warburg’s replacement for this missing detail; homemade dolls were sometimes made of such materials. As in Stowe’s description, Tiff ’s expression is kind, though perhaps more consoling than cheerful. The almost maternal affect of Tiff toward the child is in fact most appropriate to the text. For Teddy’s mother expires a few pages further into the novel, and Tiff becomes in all meaningful ways the adoptive parent of Teddy and his two siblings, offering them all the tender physical and psychological care expected of a mother. Surrounded by brutal oppression and eventually following the escaped slave Dred’s plans for an insurrection, Tiff and two of his wards survive and finally prosper, finding refuge in New York.84 Why was Tiff, a considerable but not dominant personage in the novel, selected for illustration? Dred himself, the leader of the slave rebellion, would have been an obvious choice, and Stowe describes him in almost overtly sculptural terms: “He was a tall black man, of magnificent stature and proportions. His skin was intensely black and polished like marble.”85 There are several other crucial and dramatic characters, including the white Nina and the mixed-race figures of Harry and Cora, but they have more tragic fates, and for whatever reason they were not selected for illustration in this medium. It may be significant that, in an extremely hostile review of Dred in the American of Paris (in its racist phase), Stowe’s conception of a virile, handsome, and dashing Dred is utterly rejected, and the critic emphatically points to Tiff as the novel’s only “honest” character: “An excellent specimen of the good negro is Tiff, simple yet withall intelligent, without any of the impossible sublimities of character with which Mrs. Stowe gifts her black paragons.”86 Tiff, as a kindly figure devoted to the white children under his charge, was of course more like Uncle Tom and, as such, more familiar and less transgressive for a white

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audience. In the British Westminster Review, a critic who may well have been George Eliot called him a compelling figure, and in one of the several British theatrical productions of Dred, Tiff and Dred himself took their curtain call together.87 How did Warburg’s Uncle Tiff come to be made? Many works in Parian were copies after marble sculptures, sometimes famous ones, but neither the Art Journal piece nor any other source suggests that this was the case here. Uncle Tiff was a commercial product, priced by its maker, Copeland, one of the foremost Staffordshire potteries, at a guinea wholesale and 31 shillings and sixpence retail.88 Such cast-porcelain statuettes, given a more vitreous and therefore translucent surface to approximate marble, were marketed to both aristocratic and middle-class audiences. The Copeland firm would have paid Warburg a fee for the design, but who put him in touch with Copeland? It could easily have been the Duchess of Sutherland, who—with her husband, the duke—was a devoted promoter of the Staffordshire potteries.89 The other major Sutherland country estate was at Trentham, near Stafford, and the duke (who also bore the title of Marquis of Stafford, after which his London house was named) controlled the water rights that were essential to the operation of the mills. Copeland produced a Parian version of a portrait of the duke (and, much later, one of the duchess) and others of works in their collection.90 Portrait busts of contemporary figures were in fact rather common Parian subjects, but vignettes from contemporary literature were somewhat rarer. Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop (1841, depicted in Parian ca. 1848) and David Copperfield (1850, immediately illustrated) served as sources, and a photograph survives of an undated Parian group, made by Worcester, depicting Uncle Tom and Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the designer of this last work is not known, but the very melodramatic composition does not resemble

Warburg’s Uncle Tiff and looks to be derived from a book illustration.91 The early editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were profusely illustrated, by Cruikshank in England, and in London visual images of the protagonist were soon to be seen beyond the pages of the book—in barber shops, in literary advertising in railway stations, and in various crude, fully colored Staffordshire figurines that sold for a tiny fraction of the price of Parian ware.92 The grouping of Uncle Tom and Little Eva was the most common theme from Uncle Tom’s Cabin in these simple ceramic objects, and the white Eva is shown both standing and sitting on Tom’s knee in several models (e.g., fig. 18), which suggests a source of inspiration for the general composition of Warburg’s Uncle Tiff.93 These rough works, however, have none of the detail or polish of Warburg’s composition and depend almost entirely on intense dark color for their characterization of racial identity. Indeed, their dependence on color highlights the striking absence of color in Uncle Tiff. Some Parian images, including those depicting Africans, were in fact tinted; this was the era when the Rome-based English sculptor John Gibson attempted to introduce the tinting of marble itself, though not to suggest African identity.94 In Warburg’s piece, of course, facial physiognomy is more than enough to indicate Tiff ’s African identity, and given Stowe’s ambivalence about (and the anonymous Art Journal reviewer’s apparent distaste for) the physical appearance of people of color, perhaps it was felt that tinting the Parian work would carry things too far. Though a best seller, Stowe’s Dred, rather remarkably, was hardly illustrated at all, and the illustrations that do survive were nearly all produced for translated editions of the novel on the European continent and not for publications in the United States or Great Britain. No depictions of characters from Dred seem to have been made in the simple style of the Staffordshireware ceramic objects just discussed. One of the only

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f ig ur e 18 Uncle Tom and Little Eva, ca. 1852. Ceramic Staffordshire ware. Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove. Photo: Royal Pavilion and Museums.

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other early illustrations from Dred of which I am aware is a mysterious print—perhaps a proof sample of a book illustration—brought to light by David Bindman (fig. 19).95 Its style is consistent with the late 1850s or early 1860s, and it is signed Cecilia Boyle, a name otherwise unknown among British (or American) illustrators. There are reasons to think it may be an early work by Eleanor Vere Crombie (Gordon) Boyle (1825–1916), a British illustrator of some distinction.96 Her artistic career began some years after her 1845 marriage to a well-connected Anglican cleric, Richard Boyle, chaplain-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria from 1847, and because of her social position she seems to have avoided signing her work with her full name. Beginning in 1851 her major works, mostly illustrations in beautifully designed books for children, were signed E. V. B.; she may have experimented with a different pseudonym here. The Dred image bears a page number that corresponds to no known edition of the novel. The scene represented is one in which Nina Gordon, a kind but ill-fated young white North Carolinian and the orphaned owner of a plantation, reads from the Bible to Tiff and the poor white children under his care.97 Eleanor Boyle’s maiden name was Gordon—her grandfather was the third Earl of Aberdeen, and Bindman plausibly argues she is likely to have known that other Scottish grandee, the Duchess of Sutherland—and she may have identified with Stowe’s Nina Gordon.98 Furthermore, the print’s focus on idealized young children matches the preoccupations found in the oeuvre of E. V. B., and there are links in style as well.99 Stowe’s English publisher for Dred, Sampson Low (with whom she stayed in London in the fall of 1856), published two works with illustrations by E. V. B. in 1859.100 A comparison of the print and Warburg’s Parian sculpture raises some interesting points. As in the sculpture, the only African American character in the print is Tiff, who almost appears to be one of the

children in his low, seated, and submissive posture. In the print, Tiff is very dark, in contrast to the pallor of the Parian sculpture. As in Warburg’s work, Tiff has a child on his knee—in this case the youngest of the three—and he touches the middle child, Teddy, with a tenderly outstretched hand. Stowe here does describe Tiff as childlike in his wonder at the several sections of the Nativity episodes in chapter 2 of Matthew, but she says nothing of Tiff ’s having a child in his lap as he listens; this may have been borrowed from the printmaker’s memory of having seen Warburg’s composition. It is also of interest that Nina Gordon is reading the verses in Matthew that include the story of the Magi, the “wise men from the East.” Stowe specifically says that Tiff and the children do not stop to inquire about further details, such as “who the wise men were,” but she and her readers, including this illustrator, would quickly have brought to mind the long-standing tradition that designated one of them as a black African. Moreover, the composition of Boyle’s print has more than a hint of the Magi story, with Nina and her little volume of scripture standing in for the Madonna and Child, and the children and Tiff as the adoring Wise Men. The other early book illustrations of Dred turn up in three Continental editions, in Italian (1857), Dutch (1857), and French (1859). In the Italian version, which has only a single image in each of its two volumes, Tiff does not appear. In the three-volume Dutch version, again with one illustration per volume, the scene of Nina reading to Tiff and the children appears once more (fig. 20), but in a different form.101 The children are distracted; only Tiff, rather young and without a child in his lap, pays close attention. The French version has dozens of illustrations, but the only copy I have found lacks the pages where the moment depicted by Warburg would possibly have appeared, and the scripture-reading episode

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f ig ur e 19 Cecilia Boyle (Evelyn Vere Crombie Boyle?), “The quick fancy of Nina’s auditors made reality of the story as it went along,” ca. 1856–65. Etching. Private collection, London.

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chosen by Boyle and the Dutch artist is absent.102 Dred is the dominant figure in these many illustrations; Tiff, as an older man, with white hair, appears with the two surviving children in at least two other scenes (in flight to the fugitives’ camp and—at the end—in the North).103 A surviving color advertisement for a French edition of the novel, either from the late 1850s or possibly 1867, is dominated by Dred and omits Tiff, but a fuller exploration of this would shine no further light on Warburg’s career.104 The fact remains that even on the Continent images from Dred are scanty, and in the English-speaking world Warburg’s and Boyle’s stand alone. Scholars have not really addressed the strange disparity between the avalanche of Uncle Tom’s Cabin imagery and the dearth of Dred illustrations. At least initially, this disparity seems to have resulted from the rushed circumstances under which Dred was published. Stowe, after both enjoying the general praise of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and listening to criticism of it by African Americans, plunged suddenly into the writing of Dred in February 1856, just as the controversy over the violence between pro- and antislavery forces in Kansas was coming to a head. She may well have had in mind a publication date early enough to have an impact on the 1856 presidential election, in which slavery was promising to be a major issue. The novel was still unfinished when she left for England in July, but this was part of another important plan: Stowe wanted to be in England when she completed it, so that she could obtain copyright protection in Great Britain, where the author was legally obliged to apply in person. She wrote furiously on board ship, landed on August 7, and sent the novel to both her American and English publishers on August 13; it was issued in both countries with astonishing rapidity on August 22. There had obviously been no time to have the manuscript illustrated before publication, and brisk sales demonstrated that illustrations were not crucial to

popular success. By October, a hundred thousand copies had been sold, and at the end of a year, the total sales in Britain and the United States were more than three hundred thousand.105 Its first-year sales rivaled those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but the response of literary critics to Dred was distinctly less favorable. This was perhaps to be expected, given the book’s more radical and even despairing analysis of slavery and the prospects for abolition. The initial printings of Dred in both America and Britain must have been very large, given Stowe’s enormous fame at this point, and in Britain the work could now not be pirated in additional, illustrated editions (as had Uncle Tom’s Cabin), since it was copyrighted. Stowe had not really approved of most of the often crude Uncle Tom’s Cabin imagery, and now she was in a position to exert some control. Having been contacted by Warburg in September, it is not difficult to imagine Stowe encouraging the young sculptor at an October meeting to use her new novel, read everywhere but as yet unillustrated, as inspiration for a more ambitious yet still accessible work of art. No full account of this meeting between author and artist has as yet come to light, but probably shortly after it, on November 3, 1856, Stowe wrote to the English sculptor Joseph Durham as follows: Since seeing you I have called on Mr Warburg and found him as I expected in poverty and distress. I am going to make an effort to raise enough among different friends to pay his present debts and enable him to hire a respectable studio where he may have the means of working with better light and better means than at present. I[t?] does seem to me that he has a genuine enthusiasm for art and that as you remarked there was that in him which might be brought out and developed. Your encouraging word for and to him just at this crisis has been of

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f ig ur e 20 J. C. d’Arnoud Gerkens, Nina Reading to Tiff and the Children, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred (Haarlem: Kruseman, Van Druten & Bleeker, 1857), vol. 2, frontispiece. Lithograph. New-York Historical Society. Photo © New-York Historical Society.

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great value and I trust you will still continue to feel a friendly care of him. There is a hard bridge to be crossed to success in every art and they who are upon it ought to have the sympathy of those who have entered the palace of success on the other side. I trust you will cooperate with my efforts for him mainly by still giving a good word for him to enquirers—for a man often is in that position that a word may sink or save him.— Stowe does not mention any particular project for Warburg at this point, but it is highly significant that the rest of the letter to Durham is largely a sustained argument for Parian as a medium: Give me leave to say now a word on your two subjects The Sunbeam and the “Lady of Comus.” They would be extremely popular and it seems to be a pity to confine them to those who could afford to pay for marble, when they might adorn a thousand homes of people of taste who have more appreciation than they have money to testify it with. Plaster casts are as compared with biscuit or Parian so frail and they require so much care in a sea voyage that there is a great objection to them. . . . It seems to me that you have expressed the deeper sentiments of the characters you have attempted in an uncommon degree—Not mere physical beauty but that higher beauty of which it is the type is to be the sphere of artists of this age and I was glad to hear you renouncing Venuses and Dolphins which were well enough in their day but of which the world has had enough. One of my favorite ideas is the making of good art so cheap that every young couple entering life shall be able to have in their rooms forms of ideal beauty—and of suggestions of noble sentiments. I have felt the want of soul and expression in many of the Parian works—and yet I rejoice in

their advent because it distributes works of art thro all the middle classes. In America it is true we have much wealth but it is wealth distributed. We are a nation of people with moderate fortunes and great wealth is as much the exception as poverty. But there is now a great awakening of attention to art in the body of the people and engravings and statuettes meet every year increasing sale and whenever I see a valuable thought or beautiful form I want to see it distributed far and wide among our people Pardon ths rambling note and believe me very sincerely Yr friend H B Stowe106 Durham took this argument to heart and soon began to work in the medium, and it is very likely that Stowe soon decided that Warburg should as well. There is some evidence that Warburg had worked in glazed terra-cotta in his New Orleans youth, and that experience, along with the marmoreal effect of Parian, would have made such a proposal more congenial to him.107 Two days later (on November 5) Stowe wrote a letter to Lady Byron with details about Warburg, but Stowe’s son Charles, who published a portion of the letter in 1890, regarded this material as unimportant. Assuming his mother’s voice, he simply remarks that the “rest of the letter was taken up in the final details of charity in which Lady Byron had been engaged with me in assisting an unfortunate artist.”108 The letter’s current location is, alas, unknown. As of mid-October Stowe had been planning a November trip to the North of England to see Harriet Martineau, one of the leading lights of transatlantic feminist abolitionism, and though the trip had to be canceled, there is some chance that Stowe also planned to ask Martineau to help assist Warburg. A few weeks earlier, on September 19, Martineau had been promoting a performance by Stowe’s African American theatrical protégé

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Mary Webb near her house in the Lake Country, and a request on behalf of Stowe’s other protégé would have made sense.109 It is not known exactly how the idea of Warburg’s Uncle Tiff was generated. One imagines that Warburg was an eager early reader of Dred, and it may have been the sculptor who proposed to the author that he depict some figure from it. Stowe, in turn, would have suggested the medium of Parian, and the duchess’s connections to the manufacturer Copeland would have made the plan especially attractive for all three. Beyond the goal of advancing abolitionist views, dear to Stowe and the duchess, the artist and the author would draw personal advantage from a work directed at a wide audience. Sutherland, Stowe, and even Warburg may have had in the back of their minds the vast success of another antislavery product of the Staffordshire potteries: the Am I Not a Man and a Brother? medallion produced by Josiah Wedgwood beginning in 1787 (fig. 21).110 The Wedgwood antislavery medallion type had an extremely durable influence, and Boyle’s illustration from Dred (fig. 19), for example, depicts the features and posture of Tiff ’s head in a way that calls it to mind. But there were relatively few fully three-dimensional modern works of art for Warburg to draw on for his depiction of a person of African descent. There were some spectacular recent busts of black Africans by the young Frenchman Charles Cordier, the first of which had made a well-timed splash at the 1848 Salon, since in that year slavery had been definitively abolished in the French colonies. But this was an image of exotic otherness, and subsequent similar images by Cordier (Warburg could have seen one at the 1855 Salon) became part of an anthropological program to depict the races of the world.111 The Cordier busts could not have been much use to Warburg, especially because they did not represent the whole body. Also in the 1855

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Salon was the Belgian sculptor Victor van Hove’s Black Slave After a Beating (fig. 22). Though said to have been inspired by Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this life-size nude, in plaster painted to look like bronze, bears no particular marks of time or place, and its anatomically elaborate melodrama seems to have grown out of Van Hove’s study with the Romantic sculptor François Rude.112 One work of the Revolutionary era may have been helpful to Warburg, though there is no way to be sure that he had seen it. A ca. 1794 pair of figurines (fig. 23) in “biscuit” (unglazed Sèvres porcelain) by Louis Simon Boizot—entitled Moi égale à toi, moi libre aussi (I am equal to you, I too am free) and depicting a recently emancipated slave couple—must be related to the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue (Haiti)

f ig ur e 2 1 Josiah Wedgwood (workshop: William Hackwood), Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 1787. Ceramic, 3.2 × 2.9 cm. Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston, 11679. Photo © Wedgwood Museum / WWRD.

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and all of the French domains in these years.113 Boizot was a major designer at the Sèvres porcelain factory who held a position in the Revolutionary government at the time. This ceramic work is slightly smaller than Warburg’s Tiff, but in their intense whiteness and seated postures the youthful male and female figures do match the later sculpture, though there is no close resemblance. Boizot’s man wears the Phrygian (Liberty) cap, which here doubles as a symbol of emancipation and the French state itself. Warburg might have encountered this object either in Paris or in the collection of an English antislavery proponent such as the Duchess of Sutherland.

p ow e r s’s

greek sl ave

and bl ac k n e s s

Warburg, as far as we know, hardly traveled within the United States, but even if he had, there would

have been little to see in the way of freestanding statues of people of color, whether by white or African American artists. Kirk Savage has argued that to show the black body sculpturally in antebellum America would have been to emancipate it symbolically, and he affirms that no bronze or marble representations were made before 1860.114 However, a figure of an African American was one of fifty figures in the strange waxworks tableau illustrating Dante’s Inferno in Cincinnati in 1829, produced by Joseph Dorfeuille and designed by the young Hiram Powers.115 (As the figure was part of a cross section of humanity in hell, there could be no implication of emancipation here.) Powers, of course, went on to produce the most attentiongetting image of a slave in American art; but his Greek Slave of 1844 (fig. 24) was a paragon of “whiteness” both in material and racial identity. Powers eventually endorsed the idea that the work was a veiled critical

f ig ur e 2 2 Victor van Hove, Black Slave After a Beating, 1855. Painted plaster. City Hall, Renaix/ Ronse, Belgium. Photo: Hickey & Robertson, Houston / The Menil Foundation.

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commentary on African American slavery, but during the first several decades of its existence the sculptor avoided the issue.116 Others, however, immediately saw it as a paradox and strove to deploy textual and visual parodies of the image as part of an attack on American slavery and/or hypocrisy. The primary site of these parodies was not in the United States but rather in the British humor magazine Punch, which in the 1840s and early 1850s took a progressive line on the American antislavery movement.117 The first parody appeared on June 14, 1845, and was purely textual: A Study from Nature.—The beautiful statue of the “Greek Slave,” by Mr. Powers, has excited such universal admiration, that a companion to it, we understand, will be shortly exhibited by the same artist, under the title of “The American Slave.” It is the figure of a negro, with his hands fastened with a chain, on the manacles of which is cut the American Eagle. Round his back is wrapped the national flag, on which the stripes are conspicuously displayed. The crouching attitude of the figure is most wonderfully depicted, but the statue is most to be admired for its powerful truth and unaffected simplicity. We have been assured by gentlemen who have had opportunities of judging by frequent visits to the Land of Liberty, that they have never seen anything so wonderfully true to nature.118 This passage was quickly excerpted in an American anthology, and two years later it was reprinted in the very first issue of Frederick Douglass’s North Star, so it was available in the United States to a broad audience.119 Compared to the subsequent satiric pieces on the Greek Slave in Punch, this first sally is notable because it switches the gender as well as the race of Powers’s

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f ig ur e 2 3 Louis Simon Boizot, Moi égale à toi, moi libre aussi, 1793–94. Biscuit ceramic, 22 cm high. Musée du Nouveau Monde, La Rochelle. Photo: Musée du Nouveau Monde.

sculpture. A cringing pose is substituted for an erect one, and—most cleverly—the Stars and Stripes is wrapped around the figure’s back so that the stripes evoke the marks of an overseer’s lash. (This would have been hard to do in a cartoon but is quite effective as a verbal twist.) It is easy to see why Douglass appropriated this piece, as it makes use of a mode he excelled at: extracting the hypocritical essence from American patriotic cant and symbolism. Douglass retained his admiration for Punch, and in a lecture delivered early in

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the Civil War, he praised its progressive satire and pronounced the magazine “a power more potent than Parliament.”120 In the context of the North Star, however, the principal thrust is at slavery; in the original Punch, the ironies were as much directed at American political hubris as a whole. In the late spring and summer of 1851, Punch returned to the Greek Slave and printed three separate pieces on it, two of which were accompanied by images. By this time the sculpture had become still more famous. Powers had been called on to make several versions of the composition, and at least one Parian edition had already been offered for sale in Britain.121 Warburg himself would have seen a marble version of the statue, which came to New Orleans in 1849 as part of a tour.122 The main spur to Punch, however, was the appearance of the Greek Slave at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, which opened on May 1. Already on May 24 Punch published “America in Crystal,” which begins with a mock lament that America has sent so little to the exhibition, apart from a colossal eagle. “Why not have sent some choice specimens of slaves? We have the Greek Captive in dead stone—why not the Virginian slave in living ebony?” Then follows an extended evisceration of a recent publication by Lady Wortley that credulously reported on the gentleness of American slavery based on a visit to the property of ex-president Zachary Taylor’s son. Wortley rhapsodized about slave quarters ornamented with prints and adorable black infants, and Punch therefore suggested that there might be a display of these children at the exhibition, “as though the show at a stall at a Fancy Fair, held for the suppression of the Slave Trade. . . . As we cannot have a black baby show, let America hire a black or two to stand in manacles, as American manufacture, protected by the American Eagle.”123 The accompanying sketch (fig. 25), very

f ig ur e 2 4 Hiram Powers, Greek Slave, 1844 version. Marble. Raby Castle, Durham. Photo: author.

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rough and small, shows a white man with the head of an eagle pointing to four enchained African Americans, two kneeling young men and a standing male/ female couple. None of these figures particularly calls to mind the Greek Slave, however. But the editors must immediately have thought this was worth pursuing, for two weeks later, in the June 7 issue of Punch, the accomplished artist John Tenniel (later renowned for his illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) produced quite an effect with a caricature on a larger scale.124 Entitled The Virginian Slave, this cartoon (fig. 26) enacts parts of the 1845 verbal parody—an

f ig ur e 25

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African American slave, manacled, with a conspicuous American flag—but departs from it in several ways. Like Powers’s original, the figure is female, and the emblematic eagle mentioned in the 1845 parody gives way to a frieze of whips and chains on the fictive statue’s pedestal. Tenniel’s figure is half nude, and the flag adorns not the slave but the post to which she is bound. The Virginian slave does not crouch, as in the 1845 parody, but is instead in a kind of contrapposto slouch, and the erotic effect of her uncovered torso is offset by the weary boredom of her facial expression. The pedestal doubles as an auction block. (Indeed, Powers’s Greek Slave was in fact

Overseer/Eagle and Four Slaves, from “America in Crystal,” Punch 20 (May 24, 1851): 209. Wood engraving. Photo: author.

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displayed on a rotating base turned by an attendant with a stick [fig. 27], which was critiqued by an abolitionist as being reminiscent of an actual slave market.)125 If the small sketches published two weeks previously had dimly hinted at what it would be like to see human property at the Crystal Palace, Tenniel’s image suddenly brought the viewer face to face with this possibility. To a modern audience Tenniel’s image can read as intensely misogynist and racist, a burlesque of the primness of Powers’s white slave, but its principal editorial intent was a critique of American hypocrisy about slavery.126 It is clear that American abolitionists, both black and white, endorsed it. As Stephen Knadler has pointed out, the militant white abolitionist Henry C. Wright had argued, even before the exhibition opened, that a true picture of American commerce must contain “an American slave auction . . . , with William and Ellen Craft on the block, Henry Clay as auctioneer, and the American flag floating over it.”127 David Dorr, who visited the Crystal Palace in June 1851, reports that he had heard that a South Carolinian had considered exhibiting six muscled slaves there but feared they might flee.128 Within three weeks of the Tenniel print’s appearance, three well-known African American fugitive slaves—William Wells Brown and William and Ellen Craft—appeared at the exhibition on a busy Saturday (the Duchess of Sutherland attended that day as well) with a copy of it in hand. Accompanied by the white British abolitionist William Farmer and several of his colleagues, they walked to the American section. “Upon arriving at Powers’ Greek Slave, our glorious anti-slavery friend, Punch’s ‘Virginia Slave’ was produced. I hope you have seen this production of our great humorous moralist. It is an admirably-drawn figure of a female slave in chains, with the inscription beneath, ‘The Virginia Slave, a companion for Powers’ “Greek Slave.”’ The comparison of the two soon drew a small crowd, including several Americans, around

f ig ur e 2 6 John Tenniel, The Virginian Slave, from Punch 20 ( June 7, 1851): 236. Wood engraving. Photo: author.

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f ig ur e 27 John Absolon, Greek Slave at the Great Exhibition, 1851. Hand-colored lithograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Anne Stern Gift, 1976, 1976.664(19). Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org.

and near us.” They then tried to elicit a discussion, but their audience was reluctant to speak. “Wm. Wells Brown took ‘Punch’s Virginia Slave’ and deposited it within the enclosure by the ‘Greek Slave,’ saying audibly, ‘As an American fugitive slave, I place this ‘Virginia Slave’ by the side of the ‘Greek Slave,’ as its most fitting companion.’ Not a word, or reply, or remonstrance from Yankee or Southerner. We had not, however, proceeded many steps from the place before the ‘Virginia Slave’ was removed.”129 A few months later Punch returned once again to the theme, perhaps partly in reaction to the extraordinary provocative act of the abolitionists in June. On September 6 appeared a poem, “Sambo to the ‘Greek Slave,’” in which an American fugitive slave, in rough dialect, points out how absurdly pristine the body of Powers’s captive remains, compared to that of her

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sisters in the American South. Sambo mocks the sympathy offered to the Greek girl by “Massa Jonathan”—a conventional name that denotes an American slave driver—and concludes on an upbeat note: But now no fear of floggee, nor from lubly wife to part, And here I stands and speaks my mind about de work ob Art; De nigger free de minute dat him touch de English shore, Him gentleman ob colour now, and not a slave no more!130 The reference to Sambo’s wife suggests that the married couple William and Ellen Craft are alluded to here. The four pieces in Punch, and the public deployment of The Virginian Slave by activists, collectively

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demonstrate how vexed and sensitive the public display of the black body remained even in England and how much sculpture was tied up with it. It was clearly so hard to evoke any frank discussion about these issues that even black abolitionists like Douglass, Brown, and the Crafts were willing to use imperfect tools—the cringing stereotype embedded in the 1845 verbal parody, and the sexualized black female body of the Virginian Slave—to fracture the silence around them. We do not know whether Warburg, who surely saw the Greek Slave in 1849 in New Orleans, took notice of the Punch material, but it is important nonetheless to an understanding of the norms that were transgressed in the production of Warburg’s Tiff. And Tenniel’s Virginia Slave, it can be shown, did have an effect on fine-art sculptural representation of an African body. In 1853 the English sculptor John Bell produced a work first known as A Daughter of Eve (fig. 28), showing a half-naked young African woman remarkably similar in posture to Tenniel’s slave.131 Though Bell’s figure is slighter and not caricatured, her contrapposto, the position of her chained hands, and even the treatment of her breasts recalls Tenniel’s design. There are no particular markers of American identity, and the work was generally thought to depict a slave about to be sold on the African shore; but in 1862 Bell renamed the figure The American Slave, and even in 1853 he must have been affected by the recently published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bell had actually produced a prior image of a beautiful chained female in 1850–51, but in that case the subject was the captive Andromeda (fig. 29), an Ethiopian princess of classical times who was, oddly enough, almost always shown with European features—as she is here.132 Like Powers’s Greek Slave, Bell’s Andromeda makes an oblique reference to the enslavement of people of color but suppresses any sign of racial otherness. Bell went on to make several other erotic images of female slaves. Perhaps

chastened by some dismissive lines about A Daughter of Eve in an Athenaeum review of the 1853 Royal Academy sculpture exhibition, which essentially declared that the more natural a rendering of a black body, the less suitable it would be as a viable subject, Bell by 1868 had produced an Octoroon (fig. 30), in which once again visual markers of race are largely suppressed; only the title frankly declares a racialized subject.133 This is equally true of his Abyssinian Slave of 1868.134 Bell affirmed the progressive political meaning of these works, but to distinguish their antislavery content from their orientalizing eroticism is no easy task. In any case, during Warburg’s visits to London both in 1853 and in the fall of 1856, he may well have had a chance to see Bell’s Daughter of Eve.

st ow e an d s c ul p t ur e

Stowe and the Duchess of Sutherland together went to see Bell’s Daughter of Eve while it was on display in a Manchester gallery in 1853, and they are said to have admired it.135 Plenty of evidence suggests that by 1856 Stowe was especially interested in the power of sculpture to shape perceptions of people of color. Uncle Tom’s Cabin already has one instance of an African American being likened to a piece of sculpture, though in this case—Topsy described as “like a black statue”—the simile is more about her being still than sculptural.136 However, in Dred several types of dark sculptural material are used to describe African American characters. As has already been mentioned, Stowe emphasized that Dred’s skin was “intensely black” and “polished like marble.”137 Jake, another slave who feigns a show of deference, poses “like an ebony statue of submission,” rather akin to the wooden “blackamoor” figures so common in the European decorative arts of the eighteenth century.138 Milly, one of the more important characters in the novel, is described in a dramatic moment as

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f ig ur e 28 John Bell, A Daughter of Eve / The American Slave, 1853. Bronze, 152 cm high. Cragside, Northumberland, National Trust. Photo © National Trust Images / Andrew McGregor.

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f ig ur e 2 9 John Bell, Andromeda (on display at the Crystal Palace, 1851), 1850. Plaster. Location unknown. Photo: author.

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f ig ur e 30 John Bell, Octoroon, 1868. Marble, 63 in. high. City Hall, Blackburn. Photo: Hickey & Robertson, Houston / The Menil Foundation.

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“like the figure of a black marble Nemesis in a trance of wrath.”139 The Swedish feminist and travel writer Frederika Bremer, well known to cultivated American women, in 1858 actually asked Harriet Hosmer, the most important of the American women sculptors in Rome: “Why do you not model a ‘Topsy,’ and cut her out of black marble?”140 Hosmer, however, was uninterested in such a project. Stowe herself, while in Rome in 1860, gratefully accepted a gift of a cameo depicting the head of an African. This episode is recounted by her friend and later the editor of her published letters, Annie Fields. Stowe and Fields were visiting the Castellani jewelry shop, full of antique objects and modern reproductions. “Among them was the head of an Egyptian slave carved in black onyx. It was an admirable work of art, and while we were enjoying it one of them said to Mrs. Stowe, ‘Madam, we know what you have been to the poor slave. We are ourselves but poor slaves still in Italy; you feel for us; will you keep this gem as a slight recognition of what you have done?’ She took the jewel in silence; but when we looked for some response, her eyes were filled with tears, and it was impossible for her to speak.”141 Such cameos survive from the ancient Roman period, and many more were made in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.142 It is particularly interesting to see how this gift fitted into the transatlantic discourse of slavery and liberation discussed in chapter 1, and it is worth pointing out that Stowe’s vociferous published comments linking the oppression of Italians and African Americans also date to her 1860 sojourn in Rome.143 In addition to the Roman cameo and Warburg’s Tiff, a third sculpture of a black subject was dear to Stowe. At the Stowe House in Hartford is a half-lifesize bronze statue by Charles Cumberworth (fig. 31). Several titles have been attached to it, but Stowe referred to it as Negro Woman at the Fountain. Known today in

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f ig ur e 3 1 Charles Cumberworth, Marie / Negro Woman at the Fountain, 1846. Bronze, 70 cm high. Formerly Holderbaum Collection, Florence. Photo: author.

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several different formats, the composition was created by 1846, when it was displayed at the Paris Salon.144 Cumberworth (1811–1852) was the son of an English father and French mother and had been trained in France. In the Salon exhibition the statue bore the title Marie, the name of an enslaved young black African in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s best-selling Paul et Virginie (1788). It is an elegant work in pose and finish, and the attractive and gently eroticized figure (her garment slips off a shoulder to reveal her right breast) makes for a relatively placid, exoticizing effect. In the bronze versions (such as Stowe’s), the dark patina of the material is meant to imply the figure’s skin color, though all surfaces have the same hue. Unlike Bell’s Daughter of Eve, there is no evidence the artist had an antislavery message in mind. We do not know whether Stowe acquired this work before or after her interactions with Warburg. Stowe did not regard Cumberworth’s statue as merely decorative, however. In fact, it is first mentioned in her writings in a much-discussed 1863 essay about Sojourner Truth in the Atlantic Monthly. Stowe compares Cumberworth’s artwork to Truth herself: “She was evidently a full-blooded African, and though now aged and worn with many hardships, still gave the impression of a physical development which in early youth must have been as fine a specimen of the torrid zone as Cumberworth’s celebrated statuette of the Negro Woman at the Fountain. Indeed, she so strongly reminded me of that figure, that, when I recall the events of her life, as she narrated them to me, I imagine her as a living, breathing impersonation of that work of art.” Today we tend to envision Truth, from her self-distributed photographs, as a stark, prophetic, and aged figure, but Stowe was trying to visualize the young Truth.145 Sojourner Truth herself certainly projected a corporeal image of her own body as an essential part of her message of liberation. But Stowe would not settle for a two-dimensional photographic image here:

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sculpture was necessary to communicate Truth’s forceful presence. Already in the winter of 1857, Stowe was trying to convey something of Truth’s power to the dean of American sculptors in Rome, William Wetmore Story. The young Charles Eliot Norton (a budding art historian and the key figure in chapter 4 below) recounts this in a letter from Rome to relatives back in Massachusetts: “I found them all [the Story family and Stowe] sitting on the loggia, and Mrs. Stowe telling stories of an old black woman named Sojourner Truth. The old woman was the original from whom ‘Milly’ was drawn, and, according to Mrs. Stowe, an original of finer and of stronger make than the copy.”146 Note the phrasing, which suggests that Truth was a kind of original matrix from which Milly, in Dred, was cast. Moreover, it will be recalled that the character of Milly herself was described by Stowe in her novel in sculptural terms, as like a wrathful “black marble Nemesis.” Intriguingly, the 1859 illustrated French edition of Dred includes an image of Milly (fig. 32) that has many points of similarity to Cumberworth’s statue: a shapely woman striding forward wears a comparable headdress and a clinging garment (though with no exposed breast), and she holds a water vessel (though in a different position).147 Stowe was not content merely to regale Story with her verbal account of Truth. In the 1863 Atlantic piece she went further and claimed that on the basis of her forceful evocation, repeated in a second visit to Story in 1860, the sculptor had conceived one of his most important works, the Libyan Sibyl (fig. 33). Some years ago, when visiting Rome, I related Sojourner’s history to Mr. Story at a breakfast at his house. Already had his mind begun to turn to Egypt in search of a type of art which should represent a larger and more vigorous development of nature than the cold elegance of Greek lines. His

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f ig ur e 3 2 Milly, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred (Paris: De Bry, 1859), 16. Wood engraving (?). Photo: author.

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and mines of that burning continent whose lifehistory is yet to be. A few days after, he told me that he had conceived the idea of a statue which he should call the Libyan Sibyl. Two years subsequently, I revisited Rome, and found the gorgeous Cleopatra finished, a thing to marvel at, as the creation of a new style of beauty, a new manner of art. Mr. Story requested me to come and repeat to him the history of Sojourner Truth, saying that the conception had never left him. I did so; and a day or two after, he showed me the clay model of the Libyan Sibyl. I have never seen the marble statue; but am told by those who have, that it was by far the most impressive work of art at the Exhibition.148

f ig ur e 33 William Wetmore Story, Libyan Sibyl, 1860–61. Marble, 134.6 × 79.5 × 115.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1979.266. Photo: Hickey & Robertson, Houston / The Menil Foundation.

glorious Cleopatra was then in process of evolution, and his mind was working out the problem of her broadly developed nature, of all that slumbering weight and fullness of passion with which this statue seems charged, as a heavy thundercloud is charged with electricity. The history of Sojourner Truth worked in his mind and led him into the deeper recesses of the African nature,—those unexplored depths of being and feeling, mighty and dark as the gigantic depths of tropical forests, mysterious as the hidden rivers

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It is hard to know how to prove or disprove this claim, but for the moment the significant point is that Stowe regarded Truth as so inherently sculptural that a mere verbal description of her was potent enough to inspire and guide the making of a grand marble statue. Would Warburg have known Cumberworth’s sculpture? There is little of its charming elegance in Warburg’s Tiff, and Warburg only arrived in Europe after Cumberworth’s death. Stowe might have called his attention to it, and the work had twice been rendered in Parian, so there were many copies about. Indeed, the maker of the Parian versions was the Staffordshire firm Copeland, which also produced Warburg’s Tiff. It is plausible that Warburg would have been acquainted with at least the Parian version. Indeed, the early rise of Parian as a medium seems tinged with antislavery associations as well as Anglo-French interconnections and collaborations. Cumberworth and Warburg were hardly the only sculptors with affiliations on both sides of the Channel to have adopted the medium.149 The most famous midcentury French sculptor to be involved with Parian, Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824– 1887), also had significant abolitionist connections.

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Carrier-Belleuse was in England from 1850 to 1855, working for several of the Staffordshire potteries, and was particularly affiliated with Minton’s, Copeland’s chief rival in the production of Parian. Philip Ward-Jackson has argued that Carrier-Belleuse was brought into this artistic orbit by his first cousins in the Arago family, one of whom was the scientist François Arago (1786–1853), a political ally and good friend of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.150 François Arago was briefly the minister of the marine and colonies (and also the minister of war) in the radical French republican government in the spring of 1848, during which time he successfully promulgated the abolition of slavery in the French colonies.151 Carrier-Belleuse produced a number of important works for the Sutherlands, and having returned to Paris in 1855 and taken a studio around the corner from Warburg’s in the rue des Martyrs, he is another candidate for having apprised the American sculptor of Sutherland patronage and the possibility of work in this new medium.152 Out of these conditions, both challenging and encouraging, and with the assistance of two potent patrons, Stowe and Sutherland, Warburg was able to fashion what may well have been the first African American sculptural subject by an African American artist. Indeed, Uncle Tiff is one of the very few pre–Civil War visual images in any medium both by and of an African American. Perhaps he had heard an echo of the first African American calls for a program of racial self-representation. In 1853, just as Warburg arrived in Europe, the black New York educator William J. Wilson had launched an eloquent appeal on this topic in a letter published in Frederic Douglass’ Paper. “No, no,” wrote Wilson, “we must begin to tell our own story, write our own lecture, paint our own picture, chisel our own bust.”153 Warburg was, of course, bringing to visual life a fictional African American character devised by a white author, just as Robert Duncanson had done in his 1853

Uncle Tom and Little Eva (fig. 34). This, unfortunately, is one of that African American / Canadian artist’s weakest productions and does not come up to the level of Warburg’s Tiff, but it is not clear that Wilson would have found either work fully adequate to his forceful vision.154

war b ur g i n i taly

For Warburg, however, the patronage of the two Harriets (Sutherland and Stowe) in England appears to have been a means rather than an end. No other Warburg productions in Parian followed Uncle Tiff. Using the funds raised in London, he may have gone to Berlin and elsewhere in Germany; his father surely had relatives there, though no record exists of a visit to them.155 By the summer of 1857 he was in Italy. On July 16 the American painter Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823– 1880) wrote to his father from Venice: “We had a call from Eugene Warburg, a negro sculptor from New Orleans. On his way to Florence, and out of money. His manner was prepossessing. He had letters from people we knew. He was modest, but full of hope and confidence. Together with Wild, Perry, Field and Mrs. Tappan we made up a purse for him the next day, and sent him on his way rejoicing.”156 Warburg’s letters of reference were apparently from the odd trio of Soulé, Stowe, and Sutherland (see below), but they must hardly have been necessary, since Maunsell Field (whom Warburg had previously met in Paris and London) himself was one of the five Americans in Gifford’s party. Of the others, Gifford and Hamilton Gibbs Wilde (1827–1884) were painters. Gifford was in the second year of an interval of European travel, while Wilde was based in Rome for much of 1855–60.157 Perry and Mrs. Tappan are rather more interesting with respect to Warburg’s narrative. Enoch Wood Perry Jr. (1831–1915) was also a painter, but it is probable that this was not the first time he had met

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f ig ur e 34 Robert S. Duncanson, Uncle Tom and Little Eva, 1853. Oil on canvas, 27 ¼ × 38 ¼ in. Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of Mrs. Jefferson Butler and Miss Grace R. Conover, 49.498. Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts.

Warburg. Born in Boston, his family had moved to New Orleans in 1848, and he had begun his working life as a clerk there, even as he began to study art.158 If by some odd chance he had never encountered Warburg there, he at least would have been impressed by Soulé’s letter of recommendation. Like Warburg, he left New Orleans in 1852 for Europe, studying in Düsseldorf and Paris (where he again may have run into Warburg). By 1855 he was in Italy, and from 1856 to 1858 he served as the American consul in Venice. He was, clearly, the local host at the get-together at which Warburg appeared. Mrs. Tappan was Caroline Sturgis Tappan (1818– 1888), the most politically progressive and intellectually sophisticated member of this group, whose renewed consciousness of the wrongs of American slavery had been prompted by her stay in Rome in the spring of 1857 (as discussed in chapter 1 above). Like Field, she 72

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was not a visual artist, though she was an early collector of photographs. A poet and writer, she was an adherent of transcendentalism and a close friend and correspondent of Emerson’s and Margaret Fuller’s; she was also known to and admired by Henry James. Her father-inlaw and his brother, Lewis and Arthur Tappan, were among the foremost white abolitionists. (Lewis Tappan, in 1838, had put out a call in an African American newspaper for a “colored lad” interested in apprenticing to an Italian painter, of abolitionist sympathies, then resident in New York City.)159 Caroline Tappan traveled in Europe between 1855 and 1861, and her foreign experiences are recorded in many letters.160 Her surviving missives do not, alas, mention Warburg, but she must have found his appearance apposite and welcomed the chance to contribute to his support. Beyond this meeting with his fellow Americans, we know only one further fact about Warburg’s time

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in Venice. In a letter of July 17, Gifford notes: “Met Warburg, and went with him to the Frari.”161 This great Venetian church would have been on the itinerary of any cultivated tourist, for its soaring Gothic architecture and the tombs of Titian and Canova. But it was also, the reader will recall, the site of the 1669 tomb of Doge Giovanni Pesaro (see figs. 8–9), with its four colossal struggling black African atlantes. Many white American visitors to the church could hardly take their disapproving eyes off the almost demonic Africans, but what Warburg made of it we do not know. Perhaps it occurred to him that it was an absurd variation on his Uncle Tiff, with its large African characters physically supporting a smaller, whiter burden, or perhaps it brought back to his mind his own black-and-white marble decoration for the floor of the cathedral in New Orleans (fig. 13). Soon Warburg was en route to Florence, a considerably more important destination for any sculptor in this era. Two similar brief notices in New Orleans newspapers show that he arrived by November 17, 1857, bearing the letters of Soulé, Stowe, and Sutherland. The Daily Picayune of December 26, 1857, repeating a notice of December 16 in the Newark Daily Advertiser, reports as follows: “A Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans.—A letter from Florence, Italy, dated November 17, says: We have here a mulatto sculptor from New Orleans (Eugene Warbourg) who brings commendations from Mr Soulé, Mrs. Stowe, and the Duchess of Sutherland, who gives some promise of respectable attainments in the profession.”162 Also of December 26, the Daily Crescent, more snidely, cites the report as from a “northern paper,” professes not to know if the report (or the attainments) are true, and ironically congratulates “Mr. Soulé upon his good fortune in being placed in such distinguished juxtaposition” with Stowe and Sutherland. The Charleston Daily Courier, however, provides more particular information (without

mention of Warburg’s racial status) in an untitled article of February 25, 1858: Eugene Warburg, an artist now residing in Florence, is a Louisianian by birth, and by the high rank secured for him by some of his works, has conferred honor on his native State. He represented Louisiana at the Paris Exhibition with much éclat, and has executed some pieces of statuary for distinguished persons in Europe. We have before us a photograph of one of his works, “The First Kiss,” which fully sustains his reputation. This work he proposes to dispose of by raffle—400 tickets at $2.50 per ticket. The lottery will be drawn at Florence, under the superintendence of Messrs. Maquay & Packenham, bankers. It would be desirable that this work of a Louisana [sic] artist should be brought to our shores as an illustration and a memento of native genius.163 According to the highly romanticized and elliptical account of Warburg’s life published by the New Orleans African American newspaper L’Union in 1862, the sculptor fell in love with “a spiritual child of Florence, from a distinguished family,” and married her before heading on to Rome.164 (The essay in L’Union also indicates that the subject of The First Kiss was rather chaste: a girl kissing a bird perched upon her shoulder. We might imagine it as a demure version of Warburg’s early Ganymede, in which a charming boy presented a cup to the Jovian eagle.) Though several notable anglophone residents of Florence, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, held strong antislavery views, Desdunes claims that Warburg encountered there racial discrimination of the sort he had suffered in New Orleans, leading to a further move to Rome, where he found contentment.165 In a suggestive parallel, Edmonia Lewis came to Florence just after the Civil War, but she was

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not welcomed by a white American abolitionist family who were her contacts there. We currently know little about Warburg’s stay in Rome, but he may have found it more congenial than Florence for several reasons. Rome had a history of welcoming mixed-race artists, though we do not know if Warburg was familiar with this. In 1650 the painter Diego Velázquez had arrived in the city with his enslaved assistant Juan de Pareja, and Velázquez’s portrait of Pareja astonished the Roman audience. Pareja was emancipated by Velázquez later in 1650, while still in Rome, and returned to Spain the next year and soon established an independent career as a painter.166 More recently, two neoclassical painters with Afro-Caribbean mothers had made the city their home: Guillaume Guillon Lethière (born in Gaudeloupe) spent fourteen years at the French Academy in Rome—first as a student (1786–91) and then as director (1807–16); Francesco Cadet (born near Port-au-Prince in what is now Haiti) came to Rome as a child in 1763 and apparently spent the rest of his life there, and he was still active as an artist in 1806.167 In Warburg’s era Rome was far more cosmopolitan than Florence, with a visible presence of Africans and African Americans among the priests and seminarians at the Vatican’s Propaganda College in the Piazza di Spagna. Warburg’s residence was in the vicolo Alibert, not far away, and this whole district was frequented by foreign artists, whose diversity Henry James likened to that of the clerics at the Propaganda: “The art-world was indeed a collection of little worlds of contrasted origin and speech, bands almost as numerous and as separately stamped and coloured as the little promenading ‘nations’—black, white, red, yellow, purple—of the Propaganda college.”168 Like Florence, Rome had its share of politically progressive anglophone expatriates, like William Wetmore Story. Nevertheless, no traces of contact between Warburg and such expatriates—or,

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for that matter, between Warburg and any Italian artists (such as Pietro Galli)—have as yet been discovered. Perhaps Warburg was already ill when he arrived in Rome, and had little chance to pursue these connections. Less than a year after he was last documented in Florence, on January 12, 1859, aged thirty-three or thirty-four, Warburg died in Rome. The news was disseminated, with a sorrowful encomium, in his native city by L’Abeille, the French version of the Bee, on March 9.169 Catholic funeral services were held at Santa Maria del Popolo, near his residence, with burial at the huge Roman cemetery of Campo Verano; his grave has not been identified.170 Nothing further is heard of the wife listed on his Roman death certificate, Louise Ernestine Rosbò. That Warburg’s death was indeed perceived as a significant loss by the African American community in New Orleans is evident from a curious posthumous appreciation (F. B., “Eugène Warburg”) to which I have already alluded, in the December 6 and December 10, 1862, editions of L’Union, an African American French-language New Orleans newspaper published several times a week between 1862 and 1864. L’Union was in fact the first black newspaper in the South and was published in a city that had been seized and occupied by Union troops in April of 1862; it began publication in late September, soon after the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation.171 By early December its editor was Louis Dutuit, but the extended piece on Warburg is signed by a still-unidentified F. B. The article appeared nearly four years after Warburg’s death, but its timing simply reflects the fact that there was no easy way to publish such an elaborate account of the career of an African American artist in New Orleans until 1862. The flowery language and moralizing tone of the article makes clear that its grand goal was to encourage other people of color (especially those of Warburg’s somewhat elevated social class) to excel in

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the arts. The relatively skimpy set of facts about Warburg that can be discerned in between the rhetorical flourishes are, nevertheless, valuable, as they probably came from Warburg’s local family and friends, to whom he is said to have written often from abroad. Though sometimes misunderstood a half century later by Desdunes, most of the details in L’Union seem credible, and some useful details appear only in this account. Some other things we know about Warburg are suppressed: nothing is said either of Jewish or of enslaved parentage, neither Soulé nor Sutherland is mentioned, the early Ganymede and the Bacchante are not cited (the tone of the piece is very Christian), and one wonders how Warburg’s New Orleans widow, Catherine Haselbach, reacted to the news of the Florentine wife.172 As little as we know of Warburg’s career in Europe, we have much more information about his time there than we do about his earlier professional work in New Orleans; his two surviving signed figurative works were made in France and England. This suggests that Warburg was right to leave his native city and land. Those two surviving sculptures, however, reveal a great deal about the tensions and sometimes paradoxical connections that defined Warburg’s career. He epitomized a person of complexly mixed elements—not merely slave and free, and black and white, but of German Jewish, French and/or Spanish, and African ancestry—yet his two surviving works focus on the “purely” white and the “purely” black. Would he have personally identified with either of these extremes, or with both? One of the many things we do not know about Warburg is what he looked like, and there is no evidence that he wanted to “pass” or that he could or could not have done so, or did so.173 A number of textual sources (including L’Union!) make no reference to his “racial” identity; others speak of him as colored, Negro, mulatto, mixed blood, and quadroon. (None of these sources on Eugène Warburg, significantly, mentions his Jewish heritage.) Stowe’s

Dred has several mixed-race protagonists; did Warburg select the more intensely African Tiff, or was this Stowe’s (or Sutherland’s) preference? Darker-skinned enslaved domestic servants probably helped to raise Eugène Warburg; did he therefore identify more with his Tiff, or with the white child on the bondsman’s lap? Had he lived longer, would he have reprised such “race” subjects—as did Edmonia Lewis in Rome after the Civil War—or abandoned them? He seems to have made a conscious decision to seek abolitionist patronage, but he did not exist entirely within that radical realm (as Edmonia Lewis was largely to do), and it is significant that his death, in 1859, was reported back in New Orleans but apparently not in antislavery circles. Warburg belonged to a transatlantic, multiracial cultural world, but one with a shape rather different from that inhabited by such contemporaries as Frederick Douglass and Edmonia Lewis. His ability to bridge the gap between Soulé and Stowe was remarkable, and one wonders whether he ever spoke to each about the other, but without such an ability to deal with wildly different patrons, it is unlikely he would ever have fulfilled his goal to work in Italy. In the end, it is Warburg’s collaboration with Stowe (and perhaps Sutherland) that stands out. Was it a collaboration that could only have taken place in Europe? Probably, but not entirely for “racial” reasons. Stowe was an amateur painter herself (largely of still-life and landscape subjects) and took the visual arts seriously.174 But she, Warburg, and many other Americans regarded study in Europe as essential for the development of serious American artists. Stowe had already worked hard to promote the African American Mary Webb as a theatrical performer in the United States, but she soon encouraged Webb to tour in England. No doubt part of Warburg’s appeal to Stowe was that he had already taken a fundamental step in moving to Paris and then London—he had begun the crossing of the

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“hard bridge” to success that Stowe had spoken of in her letter about him to Joseph Durham. Stowe had relatively little to say about the numerous American illustrations of Uncle Tom (including Duncanson’s), which were mostly not very ambitious in aesthetic terms. When Stowe wanted to use the visual arts to help conceptualize African American identity, she more often turned to works produced in Europe.

ec hoe s and paral l e l s

Though Warburg’s career had been covered by New Orleans and European journalists, his death was mentioned only in two New Orleans newspapers. Maunsell Field did discuss Warburg in his 1874 memoir, but otherwise his name seems to be absent from other published materials until Desdunes’s 1911 minibiography. Are there other ways of detecting his presence in the minds of artists and writers? In what follows, I consider possible evidence of Warburg’s impact during his final years and the decade after his death. In none of these instances is there proof of Warburg’s impact, and several cases suggest parallels to his experience rather than echoes of it. Such parallels, however, provide an additional comparative frame for understanding Warburg’s life and work. One artist who certainly knew Warburg was the English sculptor Joseph Durham (1814–1877). Stowe’s letter to Durham of November 3, 1856, leaves no doubt that the two men were acquainted, but Durham’s surviving letter to Stowe is brief and does not mention Warburg.175 Durham was a prolific artist who took Stowe’s advice to engage in the design of Parian objects. His most distinguished commission was a monument to the Great Exhibition of 1851, on which he began work in 1858.176 In line with that exhibition’s global focus, Durham designed a grand allegorical Britannia (later replaced by Prince Albert) at the top to rest on the four continents, embodied by female racial types.

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Durham’s Africa (fig. 35), apart from its seated pose, has little in common with Warburg’s Tiff, but it is interesting that this particular figure was singled out for Parian reproduction (by Copeland) in 1864, in several different formats, including a tinted version.177 The work bears a vague resemblance to John Bell’s 1853 Daughter of Eve (fig. 28), though slavery is not referenced in Durham’s work. (What at first glance seems to be a chain hanging from her neck turns out to be a cowrie-shell necklace.) It is ironic, given the abolitionists’ provocative display of Tenniel’s half-naked Virginia Slave (fig. 26) at the Great Exhibition itself, that in the end the exhibition’s official memorial prominently featured a half-naked African woman—one whose meaning finally denoted British imperial hegemony rather than an attack against American slavery. Another English sculpture of the period is more reminiscent of Tiff. Benjamin Evans Spence (1822– 1866) came from an artistic family close to the important early English antislavery proponent William Roscoe.178 Spence settled in Rome by 1848. In 1862 he exhibited a complex life-size four-figure group at the London International Exhibition. This work, The Finding of Moses (fig. 36), had been carved in Rome. Originally two classically idealized Egyptian ladies (one now lost but known from an early engraving) peered down at the wriggling infant in his basket, tenderly held by a kneeling half-naked African woman, whose race is signified by the shape of her hair, nose, and lips.179 The face is no caricature, but her kneeling posture immediately recalls the conventional antislavery emblem of Am I Not a Woman and Sister, the female version of the Wedgwood antislavery device (fig. 21). Moses, of course, grew up to lead his people out of slavery, and it was already common knowledge that African Americans resisting slavery used him as a symbol of their hopes for liberation. In March 1864 an engraving of the group appeared in Art Journal (fig. 37), along

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f ig ur e 3 5 Joseph Durham, Africa, from the monument to the Great Exhibition of 1851, 1858. Bronze. Outside Royal Albert Hall, London. Photo: author.

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f ig ur e 36 Benjamin Evans Spence, The Finding of Moses, 1862, detail. Marble, 208 cm high. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Photo: author.

with an appreciation of the artwork, including special attention to the African figure: He would have proved a bold sculptor who, a few years ago, might have dared to introduce into any work a type of the negro race, so opposed as such a figure is to all admitted laws of aesthetical beauty. We have one here, however, a veritable specimen of the African tribes, but with a pleasing cast of countenance, heightened by the feelings natural to the sex—for there is no difference between white and black under such circumstances as are presented in this incident—of participating in an act of mercy to the young and destitute. The bondswoman kneels before her royal mistress with an earnest beseeching

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look that would move to a deed of humanity even were there no spontaneous suggestion in the heart of the latter to prompt it.180 The first sentence in this passage immediately calls to mind the comments made eight years earlier, in the very same journal, about Warburg’s Tiff. At that time the resistance to any notion of black beauty was indeed even more pronounced, and Warburg had been slightly scolded for choosing an extreme, rather than “mellow,” version of the African type.181 Spence’s creation seems to meet that objection, but the writer also implies that over time those aesthetic strictures themselves have been relaxed. We cannot be sure whether Spence knew Warburg’s work, but he certainly had the opportunity

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f ig ur e 3 7 J. H. Baker, The Infant Moses, after Benjamin Evans Spence, The Finding of Moses, from Art Journal, n.s., 3 (March 1864): 70. Engraving. Photo: author.

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to meet the man in Rome, and Spence’s views about emancipation would have encouraged him to engage with Warburg. While inclusion of a black African figure in images of the Finding of Moses was a venerable tradition in earlier Venetian art, those painted Africans were not quite so emotionally or physically connected to the infant. In a picture by Paolo Veronese (Prado, Madrid), for example, a dark-skinned figure holds the basket from which the infant Moses has already been extracted.182 In Spence’s group, as in Warburg’s Tiff, a figure of color tenderly holds a white child. The new attention given to both Durham’s Africa (in its Parian copies) and Spence’s Finding of Moses in 1864 likely reflects the turning of British public opinion in favor of the Union side in the Civil War. During his months in London beginning in September 1856, Warburg could hardly have failed to meet Mary Webb, his chief counterpart as an African American protégé of Stowe. Webb’s dramatic solo performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, authorized by and indeed specially adapted by Stowe, form a fascinating prototype for and parallel with Warburg’s Tiff. Like Warburg, Webb was in contact with the Duchess of Sutherland as well as Stowe.183 Both Webb and Warburg were of mixed-race backgrounds, with Europeanborn fathers, and aspired to a kind of high-art practice that was not entirely dependent on “raced” topics. This does not necessarily mean they were friends; they may well have seen each other as rivals. Mary Webb’s performances do not reveal any trace of Warburg—it is hard to see how they could—but the career of her husband, Frank J. Webb, is a more fertile field for analysis. Frank Webb was born about 1828. He grew up as a free person of color in Philadelphia. His maternal grandparents were Aaron Burr and an East Indian woman. In his youth, Frank worked in the clothing and printing trades, but his marriage with Mary brought him into the literary world.184 Soon after the couple’s arrival in 80

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England, in early 1856, he was working on a novel, which is mentioned in a letter of October 23–26—just as Stowe was meeting with Warburg.185 That novel, The Garies and Their Friends, was published in London in 1857 with an introduction by Stowe and a dedication to Lady Byron, who had joined Stowe and Sutherland in subsidizing Warburg in 1856. Warburg and both Webbs were very much part of the same African American cultural initiative launched by Stowe and her British friends in 1856–57. The Garies is an accomplished and fascinating novel that has only recently begun to receive its due.186 It tells the intertwined stories of the white Southern planter Clarence Garie and his mixed-race enslaved mistress, Emily, whom he treats as his wife, and of the free black Ellis family in Philadelphia. Many of the dramatic details (including episodes of antiblack mob violence in Philadelphia) seem derived from the particular experiences of Frank and Mary Webb’s families.187 There is no character reminiscent of Warburg, but there are several possible echoes of his experience. The young Charlie Ellis successfully pursues a career as a commercial artist. While still in Georgia, Emily Garie suggests to her husband that it might be prudent for them to move abroad: “Lately, more than ever, have I felt disposed to beg you to break up here, and move off to some foreign country where there is no such thing as slavery. I have often thought how delightful it would be for us all to be living in that beautiful Italy you have so often described to me—or in France either. You said you liked both those places—why not live in one of them?”188 But Clarence is too attached to his American identity to countenance such a change. Even less well known than the novel is the remarkable engraved illustrated cover (fig. 38) with which it was embellished.189 Issued in an edition of ten thousand in England—Stowe’s imprimatur no doubt gave the publisher, G. Routledge, some confidence in sales—one

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f ig ur e 3 8 Book cover from Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends (London: G. Routledge, 1857). Engraving. The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, (OC) 249 u. 258. Photo: The Bodleian Libraries.

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of the perplexing aspects of The Garies is its virtual absence from the United States. It was not published there, and no early copy of it can be documented in any American collection.190 Frederick Douglass’ Paper did reprint a positive review from the London Times late in 1857, but no African American periodical published its own review of the work.191 The story line would, of course, have shocked many American readers due to its sympathetic presentation of an interracial marriage, but there were precedents for this.192 I suggest that the illustrated cover made the novel taboo for the American market. For it shows the seated Clarence and Emily leaning against one another in tender intimacy, in an idyllic plantation setting. Webb’s text in fact characterizes Emily as having light-brown skin, but the cover makes her considerably darker than that, though her facial features and hair seem intended as European rather than African. (In fact, she looks a great deal like Mary Webb, as seen in an illustration of her performance at the Duchess of Sutherland’s Stafford House in 1856 [fig. 39].)193 Frank Webb describes the couple’s two children as having white complexions—one of them is eventually able to “pass”—but the illustrator darkens them as well, though not as much as their mother. The enchained slave at the composition’s upper right (the counterpart of a whip-holding white overseer at the upper left) has skin scarcely darker than that of the mother and her children, though his facial features read as more stereotypically African. Various grotesque caricatures of interracial couples populate mid-nineteenth-century art, but it is hard to think of any other artwork that presents such a pair with this kind of frank, loving sympathy.194 The image’s designer is unknown, but it is worth wondering whether Warburg’s Tiff, with its emphasis on affection between people of different races in an (adoptive) family, might have helped pave the way for this remarkable image.

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Further outside Warburg’s circle is the American sculptor John Rogers, who almost certainly did not meet Warburg. Rogers (b. 1829) came to sculpture rather late, departing for formative study in Europe only in 1858 and arriving in Rome in January 1859, the month of Warburg’s death there.195 However, Rogers’s teacher in Rome for the brief time until his March departure was Benjamin Evans Spence, who was quite likely to have had contact with Warburg. What makes this interesting is that Rogers, once he had returned home to the United States later in 1859, immediately executed the first of the small, reproducible plaster groups that were to make him famous. The subject of this initial group was a slave auction (fig. 40), and it depicts an African American family about to be broken up at the auction block, with the mother mournfully cradling her infant child.196 Spence, with his antislavery affiliations, would certainly have encouraged Rogers in this direction, and some memory of Warburg’s reproducible Parian Tiff may also have been passed on to him. Rogers’s visit to Rome was brief, but William Wetmore Story (b. 1819) was a longtime resident and dean of the American artistic community there. He had arrived in Rome in 1848 and remained committed to a neoclassical approach and grand scale throughout his career. He owed his preeminence in Rome in part to the reputation of his distinguished father, Joseph Story, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1811 to his death, in 1845. Joseph Story had antislavery affiliations around 1820, but in 1842 he actually played a regressive role in the developing jurisprudence around fugitive slaves, which shocked the young Charles Sumner.197 In 1856–57 William Wetmore Story had begun to plan out a large marble statue of Cleopatra (fig. 41), whose execution started to unfold in the winter of 1858 in Rome.198 Warburg would surely have tried to visit Story’s studio during the period this work was under way

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f ig ur e 3 9 Mary Webb Performing at Stafford House, from The Illustrated London News, August 2, 1856, 122. Engraving. Photo: author.

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in 1858, but we have no evidence that he did so. Like the post–Civil War statue of Cleopatra by Edmonia Lewis, Story’s Cleopatra was carefully inspected for racial clues.199 Story affirmed he had intended her to express a somewhat indeterminate African identity.200 The influential American art critic James Jackson Jarves felt she was insufficiently Greek, though he partly approved of Story’s decision to emphasize African affiliations, which he saw as politically motivated.201 Edward Everett Hale vigorously endorsed her Egyptian and therefore African appearance.202 To a modern viewer, Story’s Egyptian queen seems to diverge only very slightly from the neoclassical ideal, but contemporaries were clearly attuned to tiny shifts of proportion. In any case, Story decided to push further in his next work, the Libyan Sibyl (fig. 33), another large white-marble figure of a woman with more pronounced traces of African identity, produced in Rome during 1860 and 1861.203 This is the work that Stowe in 1863 claimed to have conceptually inspired by having related the life story of Sojourner Truth to Story, first in 1857 and then again in 1860.204 Some scholars have disputed this claim, but Story neither endorsed nor rejected Stowe’s assertion. Story’s early lack of sympathy with radical abolitionists (perhaps shaped by his father) gave way to more progressive views in the later 1850s. Already on June 22, 1860, in a letter to his friend Charles Sumner, Massachusetts senator and leader of the political forces opposed to slavery, he described his new project as “Africa seeing her fate in the future.”205 On May 13, 1861, a month after the fall of Fort Sumter, Story, in another letter to Sumner, was more explicit about the ideological agenda of the Libyan Sibyl, referring to it as “my anti-slavery sermon in stone.”206 The Sibyl is recognizably African in its physiognomic features (especially lips and nose), though even here Story was careful to qualify its ethnicity by saying that the face was “Coptic” and “Libyan-African,

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of course, not Congo,” as he put it in a letter (of August 15, 1861) to Charles Eliot Norton, another of his long-standing Boston intellectual friends.207 Story thus revealed his political intent with this work, at the same carefully circumscribing the degree of “blackness” he was prepared to allow or acknowledge in the sculpture.

f ig ur e 4 0 John Rogers, The Slave Auction, 1859. Tan painted plaster, 13 ⅜ × 8 × 8 ¾ in. New-York Historical Society, 1928.28. Photo © New-York Historical Society.

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f ig ur e 41 William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, 1858–60. Marble, 139.7 × 61 × 121.9 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry M. Bateman, 78.3. Photo: LACMA.

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(When Story was urged by Sumner in 1864 to make an allegorical sculpture of freedom—presumably to affirm a more optimistic future for African Americans than the Sibyl suggested—Story’s response was to suggest that a bronze and thus dark-skinned version of the Sibyl might fulfill that requirement.)208 Even with its tempered qualities, the 1861 marble Sibyl raised issues of acceptance on the home front. Story explored the idea of sending it to the London International Exhibition of 1862 under the American banner, but in the end it appeared at that exhibition within the display of the Papal States.209 While there is little or nothing of Warburg’s Tiff in Story’s grand marble Sibyl, there is a certain poignancy in the appearance in Rome of this colossal image—seemingly depicting a person of mixed race drawing on African, American, and European sources—so soon after the Roman demise of an artist who was often described in just the same terms. In addition to Sumner and Norton, a third cultivated Boston friend of Story’s was closely connected to the sculptor’s two “African” works. This was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who brazenly used Story’s Cleopatra as the basis for one of the key works of art in his Italian romance, The Marble Faun. Hawthorne (1804–1864) was abroad from 1853 to 1860, first as consul in Liverpool (to 1857) and then in Florence and Rome during 1858 and 1859—years that coincide with Warburg’s presence in these cities. In January 1858, en route to Italy, Hawthorne paid a call on John Young Mason, Warburg’s erstwhile patron, who was then still in Paris serving as the American minister to France; he might have been shown Warburg’s bust of Mason (fig. 15).210 Once in Italy, Hawthorne began to write The Marble Faun, which he completed in 1859 and published in 1860. While Hawthorne is often characterized as the mid-nineteenth-century American novelist who did not take up the question of slavery, Evan Carton has correctly observed that racial identity and race mixing are

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significant themes in this particular text.211 Hawthorne’s own views about slavery and abolition were somewhat unstable, partly as a result of his friendship with the Democratic president Franklin Pierce (1853–57), an entrenched foe of abolitionism whose patronage enabled Hawthorne’s stay in England. (Hawthorne had written a campaign biography of Pierce—sometimes it seems as if every American literary figure in this period had written a campaign biography.) In 1855 Hawthorne pronounced himself opposed to slavery, but in 1857, on the eve of his journey to Italy, he condemned abolitionism.212 The 1858 Italian journal of his wife Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (1809–1871) displays a repulsion for several portrait busts (e.g., fig. 42) of what she terms the “frightful,” “negro-lipped Medici,” and speculates that the decline of Florence resulted from this racial taint among its rulers.213 Even a cameo carving of an African in black semiprecious stone seen at the Uffizi (like that presented to Harriet Beecher Stowe by a Roman jeweler a few years later) evoked for Mrs. Hawthorne this theory of Medici negritude.214 The Medici, to be sure, had a long history of keeping African servants, and the first Medici Duke of Florence, Alessandro (r. 1530–37), was the illegitimate child of an enslaved mother of African origins.215 The Medici dukes that Sophia Hawthorne regarded as “negro lipped” in their official portrait busts, however, were from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were not descendants of Alessandro, and no other writer, American or Italian, makes this claim about their appearance.216 Perhaps Sophia Hawthorne had read something of Alessandro and confused him with his successors, but it seems equally likely that these passages express a white-American fear of racial pollution that combines homegrown racism with an emerging American racial condescension to Italians. This nexus is also perceptible in her husband’s novel, already in progress as Sophia’s was making her comments.

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f ig ur e 4 2 G. B. Foggini, Leopoldo de’ Medici, ca. 1680. Marble. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Sailko. CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

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In The Marble Faun “racial” themes are evident in the character of the beautiful young Italian Donatello, with his hints of sylvan ancestry beyond the ordinary bounds of the human, but also in the characterization of the sculptor Miriam Schaefer. Miriam, whose career and work were transparently assembled from the models of several expatriate sculptors, including Harriet Hosmer, is initially presented as a woman of uncertain racial identity.217 The narrator suggests that she may have not only English, German, and Italian but also Jewish or African blood: “According to a third statement, she was the offspring of a Southern American planter, who had given her an elaborate education and endowed her with his wealth; but the one burning drop of African blood in her veins so affected her with a sense of ignominy, that she relinquished all, and fled her country.”218 This rumor proves, by the end of the novel, to be untrue, and Miriam’s background is revealed as Anglo-Italian. But the floating of the rumor not only suggests the wellestablished literary trope of the “tragic octoroon” but also echoes the experience of Warburg, and the concomitant hints of German and Jewish blood, and Miriam’s German last name, reinforce the association.219 To be sure, Warburg was not the son of a planter, and it seems to have been his professional ambition and his encounter with prejudice, rather than an internal sense of shame (a Hawthorne obsession), that motivated his expatriation. The question of Miriam’s racial identity is also brought forward, in the middle of the novel, in a passage on the male American sculptor Kenyon’s statue of Cleopatra. This figure, which is described as having “full Nubian lips,” is recognized by Miriam as based on her own appearance.220 Kenyon’s Cleopatra was widely (and correctly) understood to have been inspired by William Wetmore Story’s famous statue of the Egyptian queen, though the detail of “Nubian lips” does not really accord with the very limited exoticism of Story’s Cleopatra—it actually sounds more like his Libyan Sibyl, which was

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not yet quite in production by the time Hawthorne left Rome. It may, of course, only be happenstance that a mixed-race American sculptor appeared in Rome just as both Story and Hawthorne were shaping their various visions of how racial identity might be articulated in both sculptors and sculptures, but it is certainly a curious coincidence. The Civil War and emancipation fundamentally altered the circumstances of African American culture, and no doubt one of the reasons for the rapid evaporation of Warburg’s reputation after his demise, in 1859, lies in these tectonic changes. But it is nevertheless true that many prominent abolitionists, like Stowe and Douglass, remained major political and cultural figures in the decade after the war. The feminist writer and antislavery activist Lydia Maria Child also belongs to this group. It is worth evaluating whether her remarkable 1867 novel, A Romance of the Republic, owes anything to the impact of Warburg’s career. Child (1802–1880) never went to Europe, but she recognized the importance of foreign travel for ambitious artists and was a vital supporter of Edmonia Lewis, helping Lewis to move to Rome. A significant portion of A Romance of the Republic takes place in Italy. In addition to Caroline Sturgis Tappan (who had met Warburg in Venice in 1857), with whom Child maintained a close friendship, Child relied on Tappan’s second cousin Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw (1815–1902) for much of her information about the Italian (mostly Roman) setting in her novel.221 Shaw was a steadfast abolitionist and social reformer and gained fame as the mother of Robert Gould Shaw, the white military commander of African American troops who was killed in battle, along with many of his courageous soldiers, during an assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina in 1863. (Shaw and his troops are commemorated in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, of 1897 [see fig. 115].) Sarah Shaw and her family were

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in Europe between 1851 and 1855, spending time in Paris, Florence, Rome, and Sorrento.222 The complicated plot of A Romance of the Republic involves both a pair of boys, one of whom has some African blood, who are switched as infants (a theme later developed by Mark Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson), and two lovely “octoroon” sisters, Rosabella and Floracita Royal. Their father, Alfred, had fallen in love with and purchased a West Indian “quadroon” slave with French and Spanish as well as African blood, whom he had then brought to New Orleans. He neglects to free his daughters (who had never been told of their status), and after he falls into debt and dies, the daughters are sold. They escape but are eventually separated. They nearly encounter each other in Rome, where Rosa makes a stunning debut as a singer, performing the aria from Bellini’s Norma, in which Norma vows to kill her children rather than let them be enslaved.223 Flora has traveled to Italy as the ward of a kindly white American widow, and the country immediately entrances her: “She was herself composed of the same materials of which Italy was made; and without being aware of the spiritual relationship, she at once felt at home there.”224 The sisters just miss meeting each other; their happy reunion comes nearly two decades later, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Throughout the novel, the girls and other characters with only a trace of black-African blood are described as or masquerade as “Italian.”225 Even if Warburg’s life played no part in Child’s creation of this story in which a mixed-race slave from New Orleans goes on to an artistic career in Rome, the novel confirms that Warburg’s life was not an unlikely accident but a complex narrative that made sense to other Americans of this era.226 The tantalizing relation between Child’s Romance of the Republic and Warburg inevitably raises a more vexing question: did Child’s protégé Edmonia Lewis, who lived Warburg’s dream by sustaining herself as

an African American sculptor in Rome over many decades, know of Warburg’s career and of his time in Italy? As hinted above, the most obvious conduit here would have been Caroline Sturgis Tappan, who had met Warburg in Italy. Tappan and Child were quite close, having collaborated on a popular children’s book.227 The war, of course, separated Warburg’s and Lewis’s Italian sojourns, and it may be that Child, even if she recalled hearing of Warburg from her co-author, had forgotten him by 1865, when Lewis headed to Italy. But it seems unlikely that no one in Rome would have mentioned to Lewis that she had had a prewar predecessor. What Lewis would have made of this information remains unknown. Her visible singularity as a woman of color among the other American artists in Rome would perhaps have discouraged her from calling any attention to Eugène Warburg.

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3 “The Black Man To-day Means Liberty” African American Figures in the Work of Emanuel Leutze

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he r e putat ion of the German American painter Emanuel Leutze (1816–1868) has long suffered from the overexposure of his masterpiece, Washington Crossing the Delaware (fig. 43), first in the realm of American high art and then in the lower but broader precincts of American popular culture. In terms of historical memory, Leutze is Eugène Warburg’s opposite: Leutze was extensively celebrated in his own day, and he has certainly never been forgotten. Nevertheless, Warburg and Leutze do have certain things in common. They were both of roughly the same generation, they were both Americans of German ancestry, and an important part of their training and indeed of their career took place on the European continent. In chapter 2 Warburg and his work provided an opportunity to explore several aspects of racially inflected transatlantic culture, and in this chapter an examination of Leutze’s many representations of people of color serves a similar purpose. Several of Leutze’s depictions of African Americans have been noted, but no scholar has previously looked at the developing arc of these images over the artist’s career. Leutze’s two grandest and most ambitious works, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1849–51) and Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1861–62) (fig. 79), receive the closest

examination. It is not my intent to reduce the overall character of either of these complicated paintings to its African American component. In each case, the figure in question—though reasonably central in compositional terms—is but a small part of the whole. But the intensive study of these figures, and of other people of color in Leutze’s paintings, opens out onto broader subjects of artistic and indeed historical significance. Emanuel Leutze was born in 1816 in the town of Schwäbisch Gmünd in what was then the Kingdom of Württemberg, within the German Confederation.1 His father, Gottlieb, seems to have emigrated from Germany for political reasons, and in 1825 the young Emanuel arrived with his family in Philadelphia, where his artistic interests developed. After some youthful work as a relatively untrained portrait painter, he returned to Europe in 1841, at the age of twenty-five, making his way first to Amsterdam and then to Düsseldorf, well north of his native region. Düsseldorf ’s art academy was by then the most active and stimulating center of painting in Germany. In the next few years Leutze traveled from his base there, including more than a year in Italy from 1844 to 1845. Eight months of his Italian sojourn were spent in Rome, but, more unusually, Leutze remained in Venice for four months. For other American painters 91

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f ig ur e 43 Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851. Oil on canvas, 378.5 × 647.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of John Stewart Kennedy, 1897 (97.34). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

in this period, Venice was typically a brief stop on their tour, and few foreign artists were then in residence there. In his letters Leutze made it clear that his Venetian stay was by far the most important part of his time in Italy, and the impact of Titian and other Venetian Renaissance painters was strongly felt.2 Leutze returned to Düsseldorf in 1845, married, and there set up a practice that generally flourished for the next fourteen years. His German roots allowed him to interact comfortably with local artists. Leutze served as president of the Union of Düsseldorf Artists, and in 1848 he was a key founding member of the Düsseldorf artists’ club known as the Malkasten, but in general his output of pictures was exported back to 92

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the United States.3 He also played a role in encouraging other American painters to visit and study in Düsseldorf during this period, and overall his American connections remained strong. He made a long visit to the United States in 1851–52, and in 1859 he returned there. The remainder of his career (until his death in 1868, at the age of fifty-two) was mostly spent in Washington, D.C. Both in Düsseldorf and Washington, Leutze was known for his politically progressive opinions and affiliations, and he deserves to be counted among that group of German Americans (like Carl Schurz) who connected the liberal European movements of 1848 to an antislavery and pro-Union stance in the American Civil War.4

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Leutze’s family was Protestant, and he retained that religious affiliation throughout his career, but Schwäbisch Gmünd was a largely Catholic town, and the artist consistently demonstrated an interest in the traditions of Catholic iconography in painting, amply available to him as a child in local churches.5 Düsseldorf was a city with substantial Lutheran and Catholic communities, and the themes of tolerance and freedom were among the particular ideological emphases of the leading Düsseldorf master Karl Friedrich Lessing’s ambitious historical paintings, such as his 1835 Preaching of Jan Hus, which clearly had a major influence upon Leutze.6 As to Leutze’s early views about race, little is known. Philadelphia had a large free black community, but there was also much prejudice against them. In 1837, while the young Leutze traveled through Virginia looking for work as a portrait painter, he remarked on his amusement “at the [verbal] originality of the Negroes.”7 But the African American figures who later appear in Leutze’s paintings are never treated in a comic mode, though this approach was of course often to be found in mid-nineteenthcentury American art, both in popular imagery and in the works of sophisticated painters. wa s h i n g t o n c r o s s i n g t h e d e l a wa r e

Encouraged by the promotion of grand historical subjects by the Düsseldorf school, Leutze had initially decided to focus on the key events in the European colonization and conquest of the Americas, and he produced small and midsize canvases (depicting the Vikings, Columbus, and Cortez) between 1841 and 1848.8 But the stirring events of 1848 in Germany and elsewhere in Europe prompted Leutze to attempt a much larger picture with the significantly different theme of American revolutionary resistance to Old World control. He began Washington Crossing

the Delaware, which was not a commissioned work, in 1849, and when a studio fire damaged the canvas, he quickly began a second version, so that by 1851 there were two completed copies of the vast composition.9 The damaged and repaired work remained in Germany, where it was destroyed by a British bombing raid on Bremen in 1944. Leutze accompanied the second version to the United States in 1851. He arranged to exhibit the picture and hoped to sell it, engrave it, and use it to obtain one or more commissions to decorate the U.S. Capitol or other federal buildings.10 Eventually all these goals were achieved, though government patronage was very slow in coming. The picture relates an episode from General Washington’s campaign against the British in the winter of 1776–77.11 On Christmas night, 1776, Washington and his troops made a surprise crossing of the Delaware upstream from Philadelphia, under difficult conditions, with the aim of attacking Hessian troops under British command encamped at Trenton. The composition has historical inaccuracies—as early critics noted—but within the confines of a generally Romantic stylistic approach, Leutze was certainly seeking a “reality effect.” This is the most obvious point of departure for a discussion of the painting’s African American figure (fig. 44), a dark-skinned man in uniform who pulls an oar just below the figure of Washington, among a group of three oarsmen at the dynamic, ice-challenging prow of the boat. The African American rower, like others in the scene, has a light dusting of snow on his hat and hair. He wears a circular gold earring, and his dark-brown skin is matched by his tightly curled hair as an ethnic attribute. His lips seem fuller than those of the other figures in the painting, but his nose has a convex curve that is at variance with the norm of African physiognomy in European and American art and anthropology of this era. His soft-brimmed hat is not quite like those of the other figures in the work, but his blue jacket with

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f ig ur e 44 Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 (fig. 43), detail.

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brass buttons and red cuffs, his buff trousers, and his boots are comparable to the outfits worn by Washington and the two young officers to his right. All three officers wear cocked hats, unlike the African American figure. He has an expression of concentration on his face, as does nearly every other figure. Washington gazes firmly forward and takes no notice of him or of anyone else in the picture, but the general’s legs overlap the rower’s body, and both the general’s sword and his spyglass (in his right hand) compositionally connect to the darkskinned man’s oar. All of the figures in Washington’s boat are roughly life size, though the general’s standing position raises him far above the seated rower. The oarsman is the first securely dated African American figure in Leutze’s work. Leutze and many in his American audience may well have been aware that African American troops participated in the crossing of the Delaware, as indeed they did in most actions and battles of the Revolutionary War, frequently on both sides of the conflict.12 However, before 1855 the standard published sources on the crossing and the ensuing Battle of Trenton do not mention African Americans in the Continental Army. In July of 1847 the poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, in an essay in the antislavery newspaper the National Era, called attention to the brave service of African Americans in the American revolutionary armed forces, but Whittier did not specify in exactly which engagements these troops were involved.13 By this time the Boston African American journalist and activist William C. Nell had probably begun to gather materials for an 1851 pamphlet, Services of Colored Americans, in the Wars of 1776 and 1812, and finally a lengthy 1855 book, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, which initiated the serious study of this phenomenon. Nell, however, had to find most of his evidence in archival materials and scattered newspaper articles, since mainstream accounts of

the war virtually ignored the participation of people of color. Nell’s 1851 pamphlet does not mention the Delaware crossing, but his 1855 book devotes some attention to it in passages concerning the soldiers Oliver Cromwell of New Jersey and Prince Whipple of New Hampshire. Nell alludes to Leutze’s painting and identifies Whipple as its African American figure.14 Leutze never indicated if he had a particular person in mind for his rower, and the most detailed recent scholarship argues that Whipple was not present at the crossing. Cromwell was there, although nothing specially connects him with Washington’s boat.15 By the early twentieth century it was clearly established that the boatmen who played a vital role in the crossing were from John Glover’s regiment of Massachusetts sailors (mostly from Marblehead) and that this unit included many African Americans.16

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But Nell’s comments about Cromwell and Whipple came too late to influence Leutze’s painting, nor is he likely to have known about the Marblehead sailors. Nevertheless, Leutze did have an authoritative source for his inclusion of an African American, though it was visual rather than textual. Leutze’s was by no means the first grand painting of Washington’s crossing. Nell, before mentioning Leutze’s oarsman, cites engravings of another rendering of the scene, with “a colored soldier . . . on horseback, quite prominent, near the Commander-in-Chief,” and this is a reference to copies after Thomas Sully’s huge painting of 1819 (fig. 45).17 Sully (1783–1872), a highly reputable and prolific Philadelphia painter, had undertaken his Passage of the Delaware as a commission from the North Carolina legislature, but his canvas was too large for any of the display spaces in the North Carolina Senate Hall, and he was forced to sell it to a

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framer at a low price.18 (The picture is only slightly smaller than Leutze’s and nearly the same size as the other enormous American history painting of the era, Trumbull’s 1817–19 Signing of the Declaration of Independence.)19 He probably recouped some of his losses by issuing engravings of the composition, which proved popular.20 Sully’s painting presumably supplied the composition for a huge illuminated transparency depicting the crossing of the Delaware that was displayed as part of Washington’s birthday ceremonies at

Independence Hall in Philadelphia on February 22, 1832—a device prepared by the local African American artist Robert Douglass Jr. (1809–1887), who is said to have studied with Sully.21 The young Leutze might well have been present at this event, but the painting itself had been sold to a Boston collector in 1823 and eventually passed into the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts there. After many years in storage it has been put on display again, and its details can now once more be clearly studied.

f ig ur e 45 Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819. Oil on canvas, 372.1 × 525.8 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of the owners of the old Boston Museum, 03.1079. Photo © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Sully’s picture shows the Delaware crossing in the left background, while the foreground is occupied by Washington and four other horsemen on a rise near the river. One of these, toward the right edge of the canvas, is an African American (fig. 46). He wears a curious soft reddish hat with fur trim and has a strap (for a sword?) affixed to his chest with an oval silver form. Otherwise his clothing is hard to make out, and his dark skin, rather than particular facial features, marks his ethnicity. He does not appear to wear the same uniform as the other men on horseback. He seems to be exchanging glances with one of Washington’s officers, even further to the right. It has so far escaped notice that a second African American (with dark-brown face and hands) is visible in the picture (fig. 47), trying to subdue a rearing horse on one of the boats being launched into the river at the left. As with the oarsman in Leutze’s Crossing, attempts have been made to identify Sully’s African American horseman. Nell, as indicated above, believed he was meant to represent Prince Whipple. Sully, however, in two broadsides with comments on the picture published soon after its completion, named several of Washington’s officers (the man brandishing the sword is Nathaniel Greene) but referred to the African American figure only as “the black servant of Washington” and denied that the white officer at the far right denoted anyone in particular.22 This would seem to exclude any intention to represent Prince Whipple (who was attached to Governor Whipple of New Hampshire), but it might imply Sully was thinking of William (Billy) Lee (ca. 1750–1828), Washington’s enslaved valet, groom, and military aide. Washington later indicated that Lee had accompanied him throughout the war, but Lee is not explicitly documented as present at the crossing, and Sully does not give his name.23 Sully asserted in his broadsides that he had carefully studied the site of the crossing, and having spent time in the area, he may have heard of the banquet

f ig ur e 4 6 Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819 (fig. 45), detail of right side.

Fig ur e 4 7 Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819 (fig. 45), detail of left side.

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traditionally held at McKonkey’s Ferry on the Fourth of July, at which veterans of the episode—including two African Americans—gathered.24 This might explain the second dark-skinned figure, in the background, but the foreground horseman undoubtedly has to be understood as a direct subordinate of Washington himself, despite being placed closer to another white officer. Three separate independent prints after Sully’s Passage were issued (in 1825, ca. 1847–48, and 1861).25 The Pennsylvania artist Edward Hicks subsequently painted as many as nine copies after prints of it, and both the prints and most of the painted copies (fig. 48) retain the primary African American figure.26 Sully’s composition was the first significant image of the crossing, and the painting and its direct copies defined the subject prior to Leutze. Leutze surely knew the work through one

or more of these later versions, and it would have been the most obvious source for the idea of including an African American figure in his own, otherwise very different Crossing. One cannot be absolutely sure that Leutze understood that Sully’s African American horseman was intended to be a servant of Washington’s, but the proximity of Washington and the darkskinned rower in Leutze’s Crossing suggests that he had something similar in mind.

i m ag e s of was h i ng t on w it h af r ic an a m er ic an s

Indeed, both well before and well after the creation of Sully’s picture, George Washington was the one American political figure who was frequently depicted in the

f ig ur e 48 Edward Hicks, Washington at the Delaware, after Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, ca. 1849. Oil on canvas, 71.1 × 90.2 cm. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 77.1271. Photo: Chrysler Museum of Art.

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company of African Americans, in both American and European art. Washington was, of course, a slaveholder, and that fact certainly lies at the root of the imagery in question.27 But so were many members of the early American political elite, although Madison, Monroe, and—most surprisingly—Jefferson were rarely, if ever, depicted with African Americans.28 A full investigation of this imagery lies outside the scope of this book, but a brief account of it is needed to make sense of Leutze’s Crossing as well as several of his other pictures. The phenomenon begins with the first portraits of Washington as a military commander. Two portraits from around 1780, one by an American artist working in London ( John Trumbull) (fig. 49) and one by a French artist ( Jean-Baptiste [Louis] Le Paon) (fig. 50), simultaneously defined Washington in terms familiar to European elites as an aristocratic commander with an exoticized dark-skinned subordinate whose presence denotes the general’s power.29 In both cases the turbaned subordinate figure looks after the general’s horse, another “mastered” creature whose presence adds to the general’s authority.30 Among portraits of European military commanders, quite a few, from the 1500s on, have such a black page, groom, or adjutant (e.g., fig. 51).31 Such servants rarely, if ever, compete with the physical size and centrality of their masters, as is apparent in the two Washington portraits. Both Trumbull and Le Paon understood this framing of Washington with a dark-skinned subordinate to be especially appropriate, since he owned many slaves, and one of these slaves (William Lee) was known to be a fine horseman who accompanied him on many campaigns. Whether either Trumbull or Le Paon intended Lee to be identifiable or recognizable in his portrait is less clear. The dark skin and physiognomy of the groom do not particularly match early descriptions of Lee as of mixed race. There is no securely identified image of Lee. On the other hand, the European dimension of this imagery

is confirmed by a ca. 1781 painting, again by Le Paon (best known through an engraving by Noël Le Mire), showing the Marquis de Lafayette during the Yorktown campaign of 1781 attended by a dashingly dressed African American soldier who holds the bridle of Lafayette’s horse (fig. 52).32 Lafayette, like Washington, is known to have had such an adjutant, the enslaved man James Armistead, who also did valuable work as a spy, though it is unclear if he is the person represented in the print.33 In both of Le Paon’s portraits, the darkskinned men wear exoticizing pearl earrings. Leutze’s oarsman also wears an earring, though a gold circle rather than a pearl. The earring is one of the oldest attributes of black-African identity in European art.34 The two 1780 portraits of Washington, though they were followed by many others once Washington was elected president, remained influential. For example, prints by the American artists Edward Savage (1798) and Jeremiah Paul (1800) characterized the Washington household as including enslaved African Americans.35 In 1819, the year of Sully’s Passage, John Francis Renault’s Surrender at Yorktown also deployed the motif of Washington’s black groom.36 This imagery had become deeply rooted: John Neal’s 1823 novel Randolph initiates a fictionalized discussion of American art itself as follows: “Let me commence then with the paintings of our country, just as they occur to me. At Faneuil Hall, Boston, I remember having seen a noble picture of Washington, full length, with his horse, and perhaps a negro, by Stuart.”37 No such work was ever made by Gilbert Stuart, but the error indicates how pervasively African Americans had become visually associated with Washington. None of these American representations (including Sully’s) especially problematizes slavery. However, an early group of European images of Washington accompanied by one or more African American figures convey a different tone. The first

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f ig ur e 49 John Trumbull, General George Washington with a Black Military Servant, 1780. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 71.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924 (24.209.88). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

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f ig ur e 5 0 Noël Le Mire, Le général Washington, after Louis Le Paon, General George Washington with a Black Military Servant, 1780. Engraving. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

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f ig ur e 51 Godfrey Kneller, Sir Thomas Lucy and an Enslaved Groom, 1680. Oil on canvas. Charlecote Park, Wellesbourne, Fairfax-Lucy Collection, National Trust. Photo: National Trust Images.

of these dates to 1784, one of three small but fine engraved book illustrations by the Polish/German artist Daniel Chodowiecki that emphasize the African American involvement in the American Revolution. The image that includes Washington depicts the general returning to Philadelphia in triumph after the Battle of Trenton, with a prominent African American observer in the foreground.38 Far more striking is a German single-sheet print of ca. 1790 that shows an armed and fully uniformed African American

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Revolutionary War–era soldier witnessing Washington ceremonially treading on a British flag (fig. 53).39 In the first years of the new century, in the aftermath of Washington’s death and the revelation that his will ordained the emancipation of William Lee as well as a more contingent liberation of his other slaves, a pair of prints appeared in London that depicted African American children (among others) near a memorial bust of Washington.40 The little-known publishers appear to have been Italian. The most remarkable work of this pair shows an African American child with a book, no doubt an allusion to a provision of the will that mandated the teaching of reading to prepare the enslaved for freedom.41 These notions of Washington’s advocacy of emancipation are much exaggerated. He held on to his slaves during his lifetime and still pursued the fugitive bondswoman Ona Judge in the 1790s. Nevertheless, by the time he wrote his will, in 1799, Washington clearly associated the patriotic sacrifice of black troops with the need for at least a gradual elimination of slavery.42 By around 1850, as the American debate about slavery and abolition became further inflamed, the production of American images of Washington that included African American figures surged. Thomas Sully himself, in 1850, painted a scene showing Washington leaving Mount Vernon for the wars with at least one African American attendant, and three of the five compositions on the stages of Washington’s life by the New York painter Junius Brutus Stearns, created between 1849 and 1851, include enslaved African American laborers and domestics.43 This group of images generally asserts the purported “naturalness” of slavery, and it has been argued that Stearns’s work in particular has a pro-slavery dimension associated with the Compromise of 1850.44 What sets Leutze’s character in the Crossing apart from these superficially similar motifs in Stearns’s pictures is the dramatic martial

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f ig ur e 5 2 Noël Le Mire, Conclusion de la campagne de 1781 en Virginie, le Marquis de la Fayette, after Louis Le Paon, The Marquis de Lafayette with a Black Military Servant, 1783. Engraving. Photo: author.

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ear l i er i m ag e s of bl ac k oar sm e n

f ig ur e 53 Washington Treading on a British Flag, ca. 1790. German engraving, 5 ½ × 3 ¾ in. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

setting and the greater sense of agency in the oarsman. He is not merely carrying out Washington’s orders but is, like the other subsidiary figures in the picture, collaboratively engaged in the struggle to create a nation. His particular labor in that struggle, rowing a vessel, is one long associated with people of color in European art and society, and a full assessment of Leutze’s figure needs to take this tradition into account.

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Rowing is demanding physical labor, and the use of galley slaves has an extensive history in the Mediterranean world. To the extent that black Africans were part of the population of slaves in the Mediterranean region, they would have visibly performed this task. But in this general area, people of black-African descent were rarely a majority of the slave population, except in some sections of Iberia from the later 1400s on, and in many times and places they were but a small minority. A thirteenth-century Spanish manuscript illumination shows a black African oarsman in the vessel of a Muslim commander (fig. 54).45 Pietro Tacca’s Monument of the Four Moors in Livorno (completed 1626) shows chained Islamic captives at the feet of a statue of the Tuscan grand duke, and the sculptor’s models were evidently galley slaves from a nearby slave hostel, but only one of the four figures is phenotypically black African (fig. 55), and none is shown as an oarsman.46 In any case, Leutze would hardly have wished to represent Washington as the commander of a slave galley. However, from the later 1400s both enslaved and free Afro-Europeans served as oarsmen in less dire circumstances, especially in Venice, a city that obviously had much need of this kind of labor. From about 1470 the number of enslaved black Africans brought to Venice rose dramatically, with the new Portuguese West African slave trade a contributing factor.47 Already in the 1450s a Venetian merchant on the coast of what is now Senegal noted how adept the local population was at swimming and at rowing standing up (which was also the Venetian practice).48 By the 1490s, in both a guidebook to Venice and in two of the works of the painter Vittore Carpaccio, black Africans are characterized as an important part of the gondolier population, and soon after this, evidence surfaces of free Afro-Venetian boatmen in the gondoliers’ professional organizations.

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f ig ur e 54 Expedition at Sea, from the Cántigas of Alfonso the Wise, ca. 1280–84. Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial. Photo: Hickey & Robertson, Houston / The Menil Foundation.

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f ig ur e 55 Enslaved black African (center figure) from Pietro Tacca, Monument of the Four Moors, 1626. Bronze. Piazza Micheli, Livorno. Photo: Archivi Alinari, Florence.

In 1491, when the fashionable Marquise of Mantua, Isabella d’Este, required young dark-skinned pages to attend her at court, her agent in Venice attempted to hire a free Afro-Venetian gondolier with his wife and little children, only to find that her mother at the court of Ferrara had already lured them there for the same purpose.49 These children would not have been expected to do hard physical labor like that of their gondolier father. Such oarsmen, like their many paler comrades and despite their difficult work, wore elaborately colorful and fashionably cut liveries, as can be seen in Carpaccio’s Miracle of the True Cross (1494) (fig. 56).50 During Leutze’s four months in Venice in 1844, it is likely that he would have seen this work, already on public display at the Accademia Reale di Belle Arti. Though Carpaccio was not an especially fashionable painter according to the prevailing views of the 1840s, 106

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the so-called Italian primitives were then being given a second look by German and other artists. Carpaccio’s large and meticulously detailed historical/religious canvases (the event celebrated here had taken place in the 1300s) would have been appealing to a Düsseldorf-trained painter with similarly ambitious projects in mind. Black African figures in other roles were also everywhere in the art of Venetian public buildings and churches, and especially in the works of the two most admired Venetian painters in Leutze’s day, Titian and Veronese.51 Unlike Carpaccio, these artists frequently adorned their African figures with earrings, adopting a fashion characterized as “Moorish” when young members of the Venetian patriciate took it up in the 1520s.52 Leutze’s black oarsman wears such an earring, but this exoticizing motif was widespread in both European art of the seventeenth

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f ig ur e 5 6 Vittore Carpaccio, Miracle of the True Cross, 1494, detail of gondolier. Oil on canvas. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, New York.

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and eighteenth centuries and in earlier American art, and the painter did not necessarily borrow it from specifically Venetian examples.53 Leutze’s visit to Venice in 1844–45 initiated an irregular series of at least seven pictures with Venetian themes, extending up into his last years, in the 1860s, and testifying to the impression the city made upon him. One has a medieval historical subject related to pictures he saw in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Ducal Palace, while the others evidently belong to the category of historical genre. Much work remains to be done on these paintings. Only two are in public collections today; surviving photographs record two others, and three are known only by very brief written descriptions. Nearly all these works had boats in them and thus probably boatmen. The 1844 Boating Party (created in Venice) and the 1857 Titian on the Lagoons (fig. 57) both have

gondoliers, but none are black Africans. As for the other paintings, we can only wonder whether they might have contained dark-skinned characters.54 While the specific fashion for African oarsmen eventually declined in Venice, the vogue for black African servants to members of the elite grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in works of art they occasionally turn up on boats. For example, George Morland’s Angling Party of 1789 (fig. 58), widely known through a reproductive print, depicts an Afro-British servant holding a fish, and though no oar is visible, one must assume the servant is in charge of propelling the vessel.55 An 1847 picture by James Clonney (Fishing Party on Long Island Sound) (fig. 59) is a kind of low-life American version of this, and in line with the racial stereotype of laziness attributed to African Americans in this era, the black man on the boat is fast asleep, with the oars (again his responsibility) at his

Fig ur e 57 Emanuel Leutze, Titian on the Lagoons, 1857. Oil on canvas. Museum im Prediger, Schwäbisch Gmünd. Photo: Museum im Prediger.

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Fig ur e 5 8 George Morland, Angling Party, 1789. Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 76.2 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B2001.2.22. Photo: Yale Center for British Art.

side.56 But these comic works have nothing to do with Leutze’s imagery and indeed help highlight Leutze’s very different aims with his African American oarsman. More relevant (though surely not known to Leutze) are a pair of sketches in the notebooks of the British American architect and engineer Benjamin Latrobe. Latrobe’s notebooks offer one of the most direct and impressive visual accounts of African American life in the post-Revolutionary period, and it is probably no accident that Latrobe vigorously objected to slavery despite his embrace of most other aspects of the new country to which he had emigrated in 1796. A sketch from 1798 (fig. 60) depicts, in a surprisingly nuanced way, a foursome of ferrymen he encountered along the Susquehanna in southern Pennsylvania, two of whom

are African American men of different complexions; and another sketch, from 1806, depicts an African American in a small boat at the edge of Chesapeake Bay.57 While the artist here was a recent import from England, little in these fresh works is reminiscent of the European tradition, and their implication for Leutze’s oarsmen is simply that African American boatmen were not rare in the Middle Atlantic states. It would be unwise to conclude this examination of the possible sources of Leutze’s African American oarsman without some reference to Théodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (fig. 61) of 1818–19.58 Every European painter of Leutze’s day was familiar with it, and so were most American artists, thanks to the creation of a large replica by the American artist George

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f ig ur e 59 James Clonney, Fishing Party on Long Island Sound, 1847. Oil on canvas, 66 × 92.7 cm. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Photo: Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza / Scala / Art Resource, New York.

Fig ur e 60 Benjamin Latrobe, Four Ferrymen of the Susquehanna, 1798. Watercolor. From sketchbook 10. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

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Fig ur e 61 New York.

Théodore Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19. Oil on canvas, 491 × 716 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Scala / Art Resource,

Cooke, which arrived in New York in the 1830s.59 This enormous, spectacular, and politically controversial painting does, of course, have several things in common with Leutze’s Crossing. These pictures’ protagonists are afloat, but on inconsequential vessels, and their struggle against the forces of nature is inextricably tied to larger political struggles against oppression. The unmistakable presence of people of color on Gericault’s raft is of course far bolder than Leutze’s subtle inclusion of an African American oarsman, and the tragic suffering of Gericault’s black and white protagonists registers a

different emotional temperature than Leutze’s resolute patriots. Nevertheless, the Raft has to be counted as both an inspirational point of departure for Leutze’s picture as a whole and a point of reference for many members of the artist’s intended audience. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, affirmed that Gericault’s Raft was her favorite painting in the Louvre.60 Both Gericault and Leutze let it be known that that they had taken great pains to base their figures on studies from life, Leutze using his American friends in Düsseldorf as models. But unfortunately no particular model for

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Leutze’s dark-skinned oarsman has been identified.61 Suggestions that Gericault had the tortuous experience of the slave ships’ Middle Passage in mind as he composed his work make some sense, but Leutze’s Crossing does not point in that direction. It may be, however, that for Leutze the “rough crossing”—to borrow Simon Schama’s phrase—of his picture was in some personal measure an echo of his own transatlantic voyage as a young immigrant.62 The African American figure in Leutze’s painting is, as I have previously acknowledged, but a small part of a complex work, and the reader may by now have a nagging worry that far too much has been made of him in the present analysis. It is therefore important to emphasize that the black oarsman was highly visible to several different parts of Leutze’s American audience in the 1850s. The next section first concentrates on textual responses and then moves to an examination of visual ones.

t h e i m pac t of l e u t z e ’s bl ac k oar sm an

Leutze’s Crossing was finally put on public display in New York City in early November of 1851 and was immediately a hit. There had been advance word of its coming for some time, and newspapers in New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere proclaimed it a grand success, but few of these reports were accompanied by any detailed account. The Daily Republic (of Washington) in a kind of preview did note that the boatmen were no less noble than Washington and two of his fellow commanders, a statement similar to that of a German critic who observed that the boatmen were not mere laborers but rather patriots.63 The Richmond Whig provided a far more detailed analysis of the work on November 7. Their New York cultural correspondent, who signs himself “Battery,” is generally enthusiastic,

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but his main criticism centers on the use of European models for too many of the figures. Admitting that several of the men in Washington’s boat at the actual crossing must have been born in the Old World, he nevertheless argues that in a patriotic picture such as this, “nativism” should prevail. “I could not help longing for an exchange of these un-American visages for those of some Maine lumbermen I saw a fortnight ago—regular frontiermen, on a basis of Anglo-Saxon—the very models for a picture like this.” However, in a preceding passage, he has no such reservations about the African American oarsman: “Next are two oarsmen—the nearer one in fine position, thrusting his oar against the ice—the further, a black—now a recognized element in all American paintings—pictorial or political!”64 The exclamation point here suggests surprise and/or sarcasm—it is hard to say which. The Whig was the least rabidly anti-abolitionist of the Richmond papers. The critic’s recognition that black subjects were by then a common presence in American painting, and that they might be read as politicized statements as well as decorative genre details or an aesthetically useful contrast of color, is extremely revealing, whether or not the writer approved of the trend. The comment very nearly implies that an American painting without a black was not entirely American, and given the nativist tendencies expressed later in the piece, this opinion is reminiscent of the identification that white American travelers abroad expressed with African Americans (discussed in chapter 1). Abolitionists, both black and white, noticed Leutze’s inclusion of the dark-skinned oarsman. The African American William Cooper Nell referred to the figure in his Colored Patriots of 1855 and identified him, along with the horseman in Sully’s Crossing Passage, as Prince Whipple.65 Nell was extremely interested in visual imagery, and it was at his instructions that the early images of the 1770 Boston Massacre were updated by

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his illustrator to include a Crispus Attucks with, for the first time, dark skin, as the book’s frontispiece (fig. 62).66 (Already in 1851 Nell and other leaders of the African American community in Boston had proposed that the Massachusetts legislature fund a monument to Attucks, though the response from that body, on February 22, was dismissive.)67 In 1858 Nell and other black abolitionists organized a festival (at Faneuil Hall in Boston) marking the eighty-eighth anniversary of Crispus Attucks’s protomartyrdom, and at this event there was a display of artifacts, documents, military banners, and images commemorating African American history. The two images mentioned in the principal source for this event, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, are a colored engraving of the Boston Massacre (presumably a tinted version of Nell’s 1855 frontispiece) and “a picture

representing Washington crossing the Delaware, in which Prince Whipple (a colored soldier) is seen pulling the stroke oar.”68 This was surely one of the several engraved versions of Leutze’s picture. Nell’s reference to Leutze and Whipple was cited in the August 1862 issue of Frederick Douglass’ Monthly, as part of a discussion about African Americans in the Revolution, to buttress the argument for the formation of African American units in the Union army just before the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation.69 At the New York City Metropolitan Art Fair, a patriotic fundraiser for the war effort that took place in April of 1864, Leutze’s Crossing was once again exhibited, and Washington’s “faithful negro servant” was noted in the catalogue.70 Though the catalogue’s words emphasized servitude more than military service, f ig ur e 6 2 The Death of Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre, from William Cooper Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: R. F. Walcutt, 1855), frontispiece. Engraving. Photo: author.

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the decision to mention this detail was no doubt part of an attempt to claim Washington as an ancestor of the Union side rather than the Confederacy and to link his practice with the Union army’s current inclusion of African American units. Did Leutze’s black oarsman have an influence upon other artists? The most clear-cut case involves the work of George Caleb Bingham, but some consideration of significant works by William Ranney and William H. Powell should come first. Ranney (1813–1857) was born in Connecticut and spent his adolescence with a slaveholding uncle in Fayetteville, North Carolina. As an adult he lived mostly in the suburbs of New York City. He never went to Europe and was largely self-taught. Between 1845 and 1857 Ranney produced five pictures depicting events from the Revolutionary War that include African American characters.71 The earliest, The Battle of Cowpens (South Carolina State House, Columbia), features a heroic African American bugle boy who fires a pistol at a British officer threatening Lieutenant Colonel William Washington, George’s second cousin, during a skirmish in South Carolina.72 Three other works are more perfunctory in their treatment of figures of color, but a fifth, Marion Crossing the Pee Dee, 1850 (fig. 63), has several intriguing similarities with Leutze’s Crossing.73 The subject of Ranney’s picture was probably selected partly with the news of Leutze’s forthcoming Crossing in mind, since already in October of 1849 it was known in the United States that Leutze was planning a large work with that subject.74 The story of Marion’s clever exploits against the British in South Carolina was becoming more widely known, and he was sometimes called the Washington of the South, but unlike the crossing of the Delaware, the crossing of the Pee Dee was not an already-established subject for a history painting.75 The Pee Dee was the heart of the swampy terrain in which Marion and his troops

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prospered, and no particular crisis is evoked here. But it remains difficult to establish what Ranney might have known about Leutze’s actual composition when he began work on his own at some point in 1850. The setting in general bears little connection with any pictorial version of the Delaware crossing. Under a hazy blue sky, several overloaded ferry flatboats bring Marion and his troops across the still waters of the Pee Dee. Marion’s boat is in the lead. Only a few of the men wear uniforms, and the whole vessel, with its load of at least two dozen men, six horses and mules, and several dogs, appears to be propelled by the single African American rower. A close inspection reveals a man with a pale raised arm possibly poling the boat on the other side. These two men, but especially the black oarsman, are the only people engaged in real physical labor, at least in the foreground. The African American man is dressed in a ragged white shirt and puts his whole body into his action. An African American boy stands in front of Marion and may be holding the reins of Marion’s horse; this detail recalls the figures from the Washington portraits by Trumbull and Le Paon (figs. 49–50). Modern scholars have noticed the African Americans in Ranney’s Pee Dee and the curious match in chronology with Leutze’s Crossing, though without addressing the question of whether Leutze’s black oarsman could have prompted Ranney’s.76 Leutze certainly began his composition first, in 1849, and we know that he was hard at work on the first version of the painting between May and July of 1850. (It was nearly finished by October but then gravely damaged by the studio fire, and Leutze had to paint it anew during the first half of 1851.) The first trace of Ranney’s Pee Dee appears in a short item in the Bulletin of the American Art-Union of August 1850, which describes him as currently “engaged” with painting it.77 American artists and other travelers frequently moved

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f ig ur e 63 William Ranney, Marion Crossing the Pee Dee, 1850. Oil on canvas, 50 ⅛ × 74 ⅜ in. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 1985.126. Photo: Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

back and forth between New York and Düsseldorf, and transatlantic letters also brought Düsseldorf news. A small painted version of Ranney’s composition in the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina, has recently been proposed as his prototype, and this work renders the boatman as white.78 It is possible that Ranney was then apprised of Leutze’s oarsman in some informal way and realized that an analogous figure would make particular sense given the Southern milieu of his scene.

The only known early textual allusion to African Americans in Ranney’s picture appears in the August 1850 piece just mentioned: “We always thought that the War of the Revolution of the South, and particularly the incidents in the partisan operations there, afforded many excellent subjects for the artist. The display of the nude, which the climate permitted, and the necessities of the troops required, the service of the blacks, and the half-sportsman, half-warrior character of the people engaged, suggest many picturesque

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combinations.”79 If Ranney had read through the first major account of Marion’s life, by Parson Weems (better known as Washington’s hagiographer), first published in 1809 and frequently reissued in the 1840s, he would have found many references to slaves in the trains of both the British regulars and the American rebels, including Marion’s own “noble-hearted” waiter, Billy, who shows bravery in retrieving some military stores but is not presented as combatant or boatman.80 But perhaps even more crucial for Ranney’s conception of African American figures in both his Pee Dee and Cowpens was another influential popularized telling of Marion’s story, W. Gilmore Simms’s 1844 Life of Francis Marion.81 Simms, an eminent South Carolina novelist and historian, was one of the most public defenders of slavery among American intellectuals. His mythologizing of Marion aimed to create an alternative version of the Revolution’s narrative, hitherto largely focused on the battles in New England and the Mid-Atlantic colonies, which would show that the Southern way of life—very much including slavery—had a profoundly positive role in the nation’s origins. Slaves as property that can be looted, as “faithful servants,” and as weak betrayers of their masters are scattered throughout his text. The rags worn by Ranney’s boatman mark him as something other than a soldier, much closer to the “faithful servants” discussed by Simms, and he is the only visibly laboring figure in the picture. Leutze’s figure, on the other hand, works in unison with his fellows, a point that his uniform reinforces. Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware made a large enough splash in 1851 and the decade or so that followed that no American artist engaged in history painting could ignore it. In 1857 the painter William H. Powell (1823–1879) obtained a major public commission for a picture to ornament the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. The subject, from the War of 1812, was 116

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the Battle of Lake Erie (fig. 64), and he was careful to include an African American sailor helping to row a small boat ferrying Commodore Oliver Perry from a sinking warship to a still-viable vessel.82 The overall resemblance to Leutze’s Crossing is unmistakable, and it is probable that the African American rower was also suggested by Leutze’s work. The painting was not installed until 1865, in which year a larger replica was commissioned for the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol, which was finally installed in 1873. This replica and an engraving of the composition from 1866 also include the black oarsman.83 Unlike Ranney and Powell, George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879) was closely tied to Leutze and the transatlantic artistic experience. Two of the painter’s major works include African American figures that are indebted to Leutze’s black oarsman. Bingham was a few years older than Leutze, but his career as an artist matured at a slower pace. He had started out, like Leutze, as a portrait painter. Having moved to St. Louis, he found his métier around 1845 in the creation of a series of genre images of life on the great rivers of that region—he shared with Leutze a fascination with scenes of small vessels on water. His images of flatboatmen from the later 1840s exclude African Americans, but beginning around 1851–52 his depictions of Missouri life on dry land do incorporate them. Bingham is recorded as owning slaves between 1840 and 1853.84 African American figures have visible but relatively menial roles, as laborers and purveyors of food and drink, in several of the partly satirical images of smalltown electoral politics he produced between 1851 and 1855.85 Toward the end of this period, however, Bingham’s personal political views became more radical and public, as he took the Free Soil (antislavery) side in the disputes roiling his state and nearby Kansas. He published an intense diatribe against slavery proponents in 1856, even as he was finally setting off on the

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f ig ur e 64 William Powell, The Battle of Lake Erie, 1857–65. Oil on canvas. Ohio Statehouse rotunda, Columbus. Photo: Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, Ohio Statehouse.

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European sojourn that was so necessary to most ambitious American artists.86 By September of that year he was in Paris. Bingham’s growing political and artistic prominence prompted him to think about obtaining a diplomatic appointment abroad after the 1856 election, though the eventual defeat of the antislavery candidate, John Frémont, meant that Bingham’s dream of a post in papal Rome would come to naught. But perhaps to get a sense of what that life might be like, in September of 1856 he met with none other than John Young Mason, still the American minister to France. (Eugène Warburg had left Mason’s circle in Paris for the greener fields of London about a month earlier.) Mason initially assumed Bingham was a “border ruffian” (a slavery sympathizer), but the painter recounts that he responded with some asperity to this, taking Mason aback: I called upon our national representative at the court of France just before leaving Paris, being introduced to him as a Missourian, he thought to complement me by taking for granted my association with the border ruffians; but I promptly denied the connection despite of its honors, and gave him to understand that Greely [the abolitionist journalist Horace Greeley] himself could not hold the conduct of those rascals in greater detestation than I did. This brought up the whole matter of the sectional controversy between the north and the south, and as there was no cudgel over my head, or mob at hand to apply the tar and feathers I felt at liberty to return thrust for thrust, which I did in such a manner, as to make him appear, in the course of half an hour, quite willing to drop the subject. He is, as you know, a politician of that ultra-Southern school, who deem the right to own negroes and take them where they please, as the only right in the world worth contending for.87 118

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One wonders if Bingham, during this visit, got a glimpse of Warburg’s marble bust of Mason (see fig. 15). Bingham was overwhelmed by the distractions of Paris and in November moved on to Düsseldorf, where he was to spend most of the next two and a half years. He was warmly welcomed by Leutze, whom he had perhaps met as a young man in Philadelphia, and the German American artist helped Bingham find studio space and a place to live. Even before leaving the states, Bingham had regarded Leutze as a model to emulate, and in January of 1855 he had written to a friend that he would like do a grand picture of Washington on the order of Leutze’s Crossing, with the idea that it might go into the U.S. Capitol.88 Bingham seems in fact to have begun to compose his own Washington Crossing the Delaware (fig. 65) by March of 1856, shortly before his departure for Europe, though it is unclear how much progress he made on it before his trip. This canvas, a relatively large work but not on the grand scale of Leutze’s, lingered in his studio until it was completed in 1871.89 Scholars have failed to note that in its finished form Bingham’s Crossing does depict an African American (fig. 66), placed very close to the center of the composition, with his face visible just above the head of Washington’s white horse. The hat he wears, with a red feather, looks more like a cowboy hat than a tricorne; the figure does not wear an earring, as in Leutze’s picture. This central, dark-skinned character may have been part of the original conception, or his inclusion (or at least his color) may have been prompted by subsequent events. One way or the other, Leutze’s black oarsman must have had an impact, though it is important to note that Bingham’s figure is not a rower. Once in Düsseldorf, Bingham undertook large portraits of Washington and Jefferson but continued to think of public commissions for major history paintings. Letters home in 1857 and 1858 mention ideas for a painting of the border ruffians and one of a Daniel

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f ig ur e 65 George Caleb Bingham, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1856–71. Oil on canvas, 93 × 146.1 cm. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., in honor of Walter P. Chrysler, Sr., 83.589. Photo: Chrysler Museum of Art.

Boone subject, the latter associated with idea that a “Western” artist should get chance to do a “Western” subject for the Capitol.90 (These works were not executed.) Bingham mentions in the 1858 letter that he has not spoken of these projects to Leutze, who no doubt would have seen them as competition for the very commission for the Capitol that he was then eager to obtain. Meanwhile, and perhaps more sensibly, Bingham had started another large genre painting of life on the western rivers, and this work—begun before June of 1857 and nearly done in October—did finally include an African American on one of the flatboats. The picture is known as Flatboatmen in Port (fig. 67). A docked

vessel becomes a stage for music and dance, including a conspicuous African American man standing with his palms held flat in front of his legs.91 His gesture is a little confusing, but he may be either dancing or about to slap his thighs to keep time with the music. The figure is grinning, as are many of the men in the scene, and the only thing that really sets him apart from his fellows is the raggedness of his shirt—the others are rather nattily dressed for workingmen. Scholars are divided on whether the port should be identified as St. Louis or New Orleans, but in either case the focus is not, as in earlier flatboat works, on the isolated life of the boat but rather on a more diverse urban

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f ig ur e 66 George Caleb Bingham, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1856–71 (fig. 65), detail.

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f ig ur e 67 George Caleb Bingham, Flatboatmen in Port, 1857. Oil on canvas, 47 ¼ × 69 ⅝ in. Saint Louis Art Museum. Museum purchase, 123:1944. Image courtesy Saint Louis Art Museum.

environment. Nevertheless, it is proper to see both Bingham’s evolving politics and the influence of Leutze in the African American figure. Bingham was probably further encouraged to add an African American character to the image by the fact that another, younger German American artist in Düsseldorf had also done something similar. Carl Wimar, born in Germany in 1828, had gone to America in 1843 and started to paint in St. Louis. He arrived in Düsseldorf in 1852, and though officially the student of another painter, he had been taken under Leutze’s wing. Knowing little about the frontier

at this point, he nevertheless began to make Binghamesque compositions, presumably upon Leutze’s recommendation, and his small 1854 Flatboatmen (fig. 68) features a dancing African American.92 In 1856, probably before Bingham had arrived in Germany, Wimar returned to St. Louis, where he developed into a more informed creator of frontier imagery. It is not likely a coincidence that both Wimar and Bingham added figures of color to their American river scenes while in Düsseldorf. Bingham’s work usefully encompasses both the tradition of history painting and the newly vital genre

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f ig ur e 68 Carl Wimar, Flatboatmen, 1854. Oil on canvas, 49 × 60 cm. Location unknown (formerly Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, 35.09). Photo: author.

subjects that were beginning to shoulder more of the burden of visually shaping the United States’ cultural identity in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. His African American subjects in Washington Crossing the Delaware and Flatboatmen in Port can serve as a bridge to the preeminent “river man” of nineteenth-century American culture, Samuel Clemens, who took his nom de plume, Mark Twain, from the Mississippi itself. Clemens of course knew Leutze’s Crossing, and once cites it in a humorous but superficial way.93 But Clemens never mentions Bingham’s work, though scholars have often conceptually linked the two. In his Life on the Mississippi (1883), Mark Twain acknowledges the place of African Americans in the river’s working rhythms, though by his day people of color propelled vessels not by rowing but 122

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by shoveling coal into the boilers of the steamboats.94 Twain’s Jim, in Huckleberry Finn (1884), is not particularly comfortable out on the raft, nor should he be. Huck finds freedom on the river, but though Jim seeks freedom by boarding the raft, it soon inadvertently carries him toward greater danger in the Deep South, the fearful prospect of which had originally motivated his flight. Even more than in Leutze’s Crossing, the river in Huck Finn represents a troubled site for African Americans, where the possibility of liberation is combined with grave risk. Something of that effect can be seen in one of the more moving images of the experience of fugitive slaves, Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1869 Fugitives in Flight (fig. 69).95 Several African American families crowded into a small boat solemnly row themselves toward freedom

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f ig ur e 6 9 Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Fugitives in Flight, 1869. Oil on canvas, 30 ⅛ × 40 ¼ in. Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina, Museum purchase with funds from the 1994 Museum Antiques Show, sponsored by Elliott, Davis & Company, CPAs. Photo: Greenville County Museum of Art.

across a broad river (perhaps the Ohio?), under a glowing moon and a brooding, murky sky. For the fugitive slaves in Noble’s postwar painting, the crossing is anxious but clearly self-emancipatory. While liberty is the goal of the men in Leutze’s Crossing, it is harder to define the status and future of the black oarsman. His origins lie in the representation of Washington’s own human chattel. As William Cooper Nell shrewdly perceived, Leutze’s inclusion of the figure most probably conveys a promise of future redemption—evidence that African Americans actively joined in the revolutionary struggle and are thus deserving of the freedom and citizenship not yet theirs. And Leutze was not done with thinking through the meaning of African Americans in the formation of the new nation, as two further paintings attest.

wa s h i n g t o n a s s u r v e y o r mrs. schuyler

and

In the immediate aftermath of the success of his Washington Crossing the Delaware, Leutze sensibly hastened to produce other compositions set in the same era. Two smaller paintings from 1852, probably executed in the New York studio that the artist had rented, give African American characters substantial attention. One of these belongs to that category of images, so popular around 1850, which explored the fabric of Washington’s life outside his grand martial exploits. Washington as Surveyor (fig. 70), like so many of Leutze’s lesser works, has largely been lost sight of by scholars, but it was certainly noticed at the time.96 It depicts a young, freshfaced, and vigorous Washington (around 1750), carrying a flintlock, striding over a fallen tree trunk in the

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f ig ur e 70 Emanuel Leutze, Washington as Surveyor, 1852. Oil on canvas, 40 ⅜ × 53 ⅞ in. Cooper Union, New York. Photo courtesy of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Virginia wilderness. His only companion is a youthful African American in a straw hat and a striped redand-pale-green shirt who, carrying a surveyor’s case, follows close behind. As is in the Crossing, the figures overlap, and Washington stands much taller; the thin cylinder of the surveyor’s case in the assistant’s hand is a little reminiscent of the rower’s oar in the Crossing. Compared to the Stearns and Sully works discussed above, Leutze’s picture assigns a far more pictorially conspicuous role to its black character, and in a certain sense it is much closer to the Trumbull and Le Paon

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portraits (figs. 49–50), in which Washington and his black subordinate are isolated. But in those earlier works the subordinate looks to either the General or his horse, whereas Leutze’s assistant does not face toward his “master” but rather gazes off to the left, into the imposing wilderness, with a somewhat awestruck expression. Washington too, though he is far more poised, seems to be taken with the vastness of the domain he is exploring. I have not discovered any account of Washington’s life that indicates he brought an African American assistant with him on his youthful surveying expeditions.97 The other relevant work of 1852 is Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (fig. 71), which takes up a previously unillustrated Revolutionary War story that would have been accessible to Leutze in a widely read book by Elizabeth F. Ellet, The Women of the American Revolution, published just a few years earlier, in 1848–50.98 This feminist publication was the first of its kind, and Leutze’s interest in it demonstrates his more inclusive view of who had been a patriot during the Revolution. Ellet’s account of Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler’s heroic act is evidently the first instance of this episode appearing in print; she probably found the story in an 1846 letter written by Schuyler’s youngest daughter.99 According to both sources, late in 1777 General Philip Schuyler had asked his wife to set fire to the crops on their estate near Saratoga in order to deny provisions to the advancing British Army. Both accounts are extremely brief, and neither mentions an African American or indeed any other person assisting Mrs. Schuyler, though Ellet’s version describes General Schuyler asking his wife to encourage “his tenants, and others,” to burn their crops as well. (Modern historians are highly skeptical that this event occurred at all, but no one in the mid-nineteenth century raised any question about it.)100 No clear evidence indicates that this work was commissioned. Leutze often chose his historical

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f ig ur e 7 1 Emanuel Leutze, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields, 1852. Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 101.6 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bicentennial gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Schaaf, Mr. and Mrs. William D. Witherspoon, Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Shoemaker, and Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., M.76.91. Photo: LACMA.

subjects, and there are reasons to think he picked this one on his own. He was probably familiar with Jakob Becker’s painting The Storm, an 1840 Düsseldorf-school picture that includes a burning field; and for an 1847 collection of poetry by William Cullen Bryant, he designed an engraving that shows the Old Testament heroine Rizpah holding a burning brand.101 However, in choosing this new subject, Leutze was undoubtedly also affirming the presence of women of action among the patriots. His choice may have been encouraged by the rapid growth of the American women’s rights movement between 1848 and 1851. Catherine Schuyler wears the national colors of red, white, and blue, and it is worth emphasizing that Catherine and a young woman who may be intended as one of her older children are the figures who set the wheat alight, while the only mature

man in the foreground (the estate manager?) seems more alarmed by the imminent arrival of the enemy. Catherine Schuyler, however, is assisted by an African American youth (fig. 72) who holds the candle from which the wheat has been lit. This kneeling adolescent boy, who looks at the burning wheat rather than the matron towering above him, is also costumed in patriotic colors, with a red shirt and dark-blue pants that are partly illuminated by his white candle. At the far right stands the packed-up coach that will convey the foreground group away from the estate as soon as the deed is done, and the horses are being hitched up by an African American man (never discussed in the scholarly literature) (fig. 73) wearing a straw hat much like that of the African American figure in Washington as Surveyor (fig. 70).

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f ig ur e 72 Emanuel Leutze, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields, 1852 (fig. 71), detail of boy.

f ig ur e 7 3 Emanuel Leutze, Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields, 1852 (fig. 71), detail of background.

Since no textual source affirmed the presence of African Americans assisting Mrs. Schuyler, Leutze’s inclusion of these two figures requires some explanation. It is certainly true that Philip Schuyler owned slaves—ten are recorded in 1776, and fourteen in 1787—but it is not likely that Leutze would have known this.102 The upstate New York setting of the event would not automatically have suggested the presence of African Americans in a rural setting. It may be that Leutze liked the idea of contrasting the boy’s dark skin with the white candle and bright flame. This was a visual trope known to at least one other European artist in the mid-1800s.103 But it hardly explains the inclusion of so prominent a figure, or the presence of the teamster at the right. Rather, Leutze seems emboldened here to assign to African

Americans a still-subordinate but far more conspicuous role in revolutionary activity than he had in the Crossing. Neither the boy nor Catherine Schuyler herself is a soldier, but each holds a potent weapon in these circumstances. Moreover, the burning of crops and the houses of masters was a feared aspect of slave rebellions. For this reason, perhaps, Leutze rather hems in the youth in compositional terms, so that it is clear he is acting in concert with the white figures. This same caution may also account for his kneeling pose and not-quite-full-grown stature, which bring to mind the older European tradition of black pages to white mistresses (fig. 74). It may also be relevant that the women’s rights movement that brought this subject to the fore was also closely tied to abolitionism and that African American men and women had a

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f ig ur e 7 4 Nicolas Lancret, Escaped Bird, ca. 1730–36. Oil on canvas, 40 × 54.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Martin Brimmer Fund, Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund, and Mrs. Edward Wheelwright Fund, 40.478. Photo © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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significant presence at the conventions that advanced the movement’s agenda in 1848–51. Leutze is described as already at work on this picture in a short piece in the New York Herald of February 7, 1852, but this notice does not mention a commissioner or prospective buyer.104 The earliest known owner (in January 1856) was Charles M. Leupp, an extremely wealthy New York leather dealer and financier who possessed an extensive art collection. Leupp had contributed to the costs of a Washington statue in his city and was involved in other cultural and civic initiatives. His personal political views are not well known, but he was a close friend of the poet and progressive newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant, with whom he had traveled in Europe three times in the 1840s and 1850s. Bryant had a long-standing interest in visual art, and Bryant and Leupp visited Leutze in Düsseldorf in 1845. Leutze then provided illustrations for an edition of Bryant’s poems in 1847, including the Rizpah mentioned above, and at some point Leutze also made a portrait of Leupp.105 Leupp’s interest in this particular subject of Leutze’s may also have had something to do with the taste of his mother-in-law, Isabella Williamson Lee. Isabella was the wife of Gideon Lee, who had served as mayor of New York City in the 1830s, and she and her husband had moved upstate to Geneva shortly before his death, in 1841. Leupp and Isabella Lee were avid collectors of genre paintings by William Sidney Mount that featured salient African American characters, including the famous Power of Music and Banjo Player.106 Lee, one imagines, would have been attracted to Leutze’s picture of another woman living alone on a large property in upstate New York. Leupp’s large collection of paintings and prints, at his death in 1859, reveals a special fascination with African Americans, split almost equally between genre and historical subjects (he owned an engraving of Leutze’s Crossing as well). No other American art

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collector in the 1850s is likely to have had a greater concentration of such images.107

c api t ol c on t r ov er s i e s

Though smaller pictures like Washington as Surveyor and Mrs. Schuyler were probably profitable, Leutze’s continuing interest in patriotic American subjects was aimed primarily toward the grand public commissions that were then the touchstones of professional success, fame, and financial security for most American and European artists. For all of its warm welcome by American audiences, the Crossing had not been timed quite right in the pursuit of this goal, and pictures like Mrs. Schuyler were probably intended to remind government officials that Leutze was committed to these patriotic subjects. Indeed, in January of 1854 Leutze was finally contacted by the most influential man in the world of American public commissions, Montgomery Meigs (1816–1892). Meigs was a West Point graduate, an army engineer with a growing reputation, and in 1853 he was appointed by Senator and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to supervise the continued construction of the U.S. Capitol. He took an immediate interest in sculptural and painted embellishments of the building, and Leutze was one of the first on his list of prospective artists. In November of 1854 Meigs confided to his journal that he intended to have Leutze contribute to the Capitol, but negotiations proceeded slowly.108 In 1857 Leutze laid out a vast but nebulous proposal for paintings in the Capitol to include subjects from eight categories, about half of which were martial in theme and the other half generally focused on discovery and emigration.109 There was really a bit too much here to choose from, and Meigs recognized that the polarized state of the nation and the pro-slavery views of Davis, his superior and patron, meant that he would have to take a cautious line in arranging for commissions. For example, in 1855 Meigs was contacted by

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Henry Kirke Brown (1814–1886), a Massachusetts-born sculptor seeking a commission for one of the pediments on the new House of Representatives wing of the Capitol.110 Brown had recently completed a bronze funerary monument to the New York politician DeWitt Clinton (d. 1828) (in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn), with reliefs commemorating Clinton’s major role in building the Erie Canal, and he included a prominent, shirtless, earringed African American laborer loading a box of Virginia tobacco onto a barge (fig. 75).111 As the Capitol pediment’s theme was to be labor, Brown’s proposal similarly included a slave on a bale of cotton. Meigs immediately rejected this detail, calling it “a sore subject.” Brown (who had already expressed antislavery views earlier on) argued that as slavery was part of American life, it should be shown, but Meigs replied that Southerners, despite

f ig ur e 75 author.

their vigorous defense of slavery as a humane (!) institution, “did not like to have it alluded to.” In his journal Meigs remarked: “I told Mr. Brown that his Negro must absolutely go out. The feeling of the country at this time is such as to lead to innumerable squibs if it is put in.” Brown was disturbed by this excision, which left him “feeling a little as though I had kneeled to slavery,” and soon replaced the figure with a white miner.112 A few years later, in 1859, Brown did manage to persuade the South Carolina senator Wade Hampton and others to let him show enslaved African Americans laboring in a pediment designed for the state house in Columbia, but the plan never got further than a model, which was destroyed by Sherman’s troops during the Civil War.113 Brown’s star-crossed attempts to include African American figures in public sculpture persisted into the postwar period:

Henry Kirke Brown, The Erie Canal, from his tomb of DeWitt Clinton, 1853. Bronze. Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn. Photo:

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the first project (1866–67) for his 1866–69 monument to Abraham Lincoln in Brooklyn included a diminutive black soldier kneeling in front of the president, but this idea was eventually discarded.114 Indeed, as both Vivien Green Fryd and Kirk Savage have pointed out, there was apparently a tacit understanding that African Americans should be excluded from the figurative decorations of the U.S. Capitol.115 As early as 1817 abolitionists had protested the existence of slavery in the nation’s capital, using images of slaves juxtaposed with the Capitol building to highlight the hypocrisy of slaveholders who purported to love freedom, and for eight years (1836–44) Southern politicians managed to institute a “gag rule” that forbade the legislative branch from receiving any communications pertaining to slavery.116 The resistance to visual images of African Americans in the Capitol almost reads as an echo of this. From March 15 to April 4, 1851, Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (and thus his black oarsman) was temporarily displayed in the Capitol rotunda, as part of an initiative to get Congress to buy it, which might have succeeded had Leutze not suddenly decided to sell to a private individual.117 American Indians were often depicted at the Capitol, sometimes as savages and sometimes in more positive ways, but until the Civil War perhaps the only permanent visual manifestation of African American identity in the Capitol was in the Italian painter Constantino Brumidi’s vast fresco The Surrender of Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown, painted in 1857 for the south wall of the House chamber.118 A young African American man appears at the far right margin (fig. 76), behind one of Washington’s officers, and this inclusion surely depends on the tradition of representing General Washington as attended by one of his enslaved men during wartime. There is, at any rate, no record of Meigs or Davis objecting to this figure, who is compositionally marginal but nevertheless one of

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only ten figures in the foreground and roughly life-size. Another exception to the general exclusion of blacks is to be found on Randolph Rogers’s bronze doors dedicated to the life of Columbus. The doors connect the Capitol rotunda to the east façade of the building, and though they were begun in 1855, they were not finished until the middle of the war, in 1863, and only installed in 1871. Here, as Fryd notes, the exception can be explained by the fact that this is an African rather than an African American figure, one of a group of four women who are allegories of the continents.119 It is interesting to note that Rogers, a longtime resident of Rome, was inspired by the doors of Lorenzo Ghiberti for the Florentine Baptistery (1404–51) and that these Renaissance doors also include a conspicuous black African attendant in a representation of the Adoration of the Magi (this composition 1404–7).120 The sensitivity about references to American slaves extended well beyond actual depictions of them. Perhaps the best-known controversy about the decoration of the Capitol was Jefferson Davis’s insistence that Thomas Crawford’s colossal allegorical figure for the crown of the great dome could not include a liberty cap. Crawford, yet another American artist expatriate, had been in Rome since 1835. In 1855 Meigs settled the commission on him, which was originally conceived by the Capitol architect Thomas Walther as a figure of Liberty, thus rendering the liberty cap an appropriate attribute. Davis saw in this a covert abolitionist design, but Crawford defended the cap in a letter to Meigs of October 18, 1855: “It is quite possible that Mr. Jefferson Davis may, as upon a former occasion, object to the cap of Liberty and the fasces. I can only say in reply that the work is for the people, and they must be addressed in language they understand, and which has become unalterable for the masses.”121 (The “former occasion” was that of a similar dispute about a detail in the marble reliefs ornamenting the area

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f ig ur e 7 6 Constantino Brumidi, The Surrender of Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown, 1857. Oil on canvas. House Chamber, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. Photo: Architect of the Capitol.

above the bronze doors that Crawford had designed for the Senate wing; here the figure of Liberty was simply replaced by one of History, eliminating both cap and fasces.)122 In an unctuous letter of January 15, 1856, Davis argued against the cap once more, on the (dubious) grounds that Americans—he meant white Americans—had never been slaves, so they should not wear the symbol of a freedman.123 Though an old friend of Charles Sumner’s, Crawford himself was no abolitionist, and in a letter to his wife a couple of years earlier ( June 23, 1854) had expressed the wish to banish “Niggers . . . and the anti-slavery population,” but Davis’s demands clearly grated.124 Crawford eventually had to agree to replace the cap with a feathered headgear (incorporating the head of an eagle) with Native American connotations, a scheme that Davis

approved in April of 1856.125 In the end the completion and erection of Freedom (fig. 77) in 1862–63 allowed African Americans to claim some part of its glory. Crawford died in 1857, and Congress employed Clark Mills (the American sculptor much abused by Warburg’s advocate in 1855) to supervise the casting of the work in 1860–62. One of Mills’s chief workmen on the project was the enslaved man Philip Reid (ca. 1817–1892), and an early account suggests that the “highly intelligent” Reid stepped in to solve one of the key problems in handling the plaster molds for the casting.126 Reid, along with the rest of Mills’s slaves, was freed by federal decree in April of 1862—Mills received compensation—but in 1865 Mills himself was denounced as having been a Confederate sympathizer during the war.127 The final erection of the

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wrote in 1870: “How, when, and by whom our art will thus be crowned, is a secret of God. When the white workman turned rebel, a negro assistant completed the cast of Crawford’s ‘Liberty,’ which now surmounts the dome of the Capitol at Washington.”128 w e s t wa r d t h e c o u r s e o f e m p i r e

f ig ur e 77 Thomas Crawford, Freedom, 1855–57, erected 1862–63. Bronze. Top of dome, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. Photo: Architect of the Capitol.

statue, on December 2, 1863, was carried out by a crew including a number of freed slaves from the city. Several mainstream journalists and writers celebrated the participation of African Americans in completing the statue. For example, James Jackson Jarves, the most sophisticated American art critic of the period,

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As a result of the financial panic of 1857, Leutze’s income declined. In late 1858 he decided that a return to the United States might improve his prospects. He arrived in Boston by the end of January 1859, and on February 12 Meigs invited him to Washington, D.C., to discuss one or more commissions for the Capitol. Leutze arrived there on February 16, but no solid agreement emerged.129 Presumably there was at this point some slightly more concrete discussion of the idea of a work dedicated to the theme of emigration to the West, but Meigs was soon (though only temporarily) removed from his position, and Leutze seems to have oscillated between New York City and Washington for most of the next two years. As for public opinion about how the embellishment of the Capitol ought to proceed and what the newly returned Leutze’s role in it should be, it is relevant to consider an article entitled “The Decoration of the Capitol” in the antislavery newspaper the Independent of October 6, 1859.130 This Congregationalist paper was already closely associated with the influential Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother), but the article was simply signed “B.B.” In general, the writer attacks the grand rhetorical posture of the existing figurative imagery and recommends Leutze as an artist likely to create something more stirring and real. Eastman Johnson’s recently completed Negro Life at the South (New-York Historical Society, New York), an ambitious genre image of contemporary slave life, is also praised as “honest” and as “an actual and worthy

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subject.” ( Johnson, it should also be noted, had been one of Leutze’s students in Düsseldorf and had helped him make a replica of the Crossing.)131 What Leutze in fact began to develop was a panoramic image of the American landscape and its people, with a focus on the pioneer experience. Though Leutze himself had not yet been especially far west in the United States, like many other Germans he was fascinated by the frontier, and he laid out a long and heterogeneous procession of pioneers wending their way over the Continental Divide. So that the symbolic implications of this group would be unmistakable, he entitled it Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, though it was also often known as Westward Ho!132 The subject, as Meigs originally understood it and Leutze began to plan it, would not address the almost-to-the-boil tensions over slavery in these years but instead displace the national vision toward the internal emigration to a distant, unfolding frontier where a happier American destiny would be enacted. This evasion must have seemed increasingly prudent with the insurrection of John Brown and his group at Harper’s Ferry late in 1859, his execution in 1860, the election of Lincoln in November of that year, and the process of secession that quickly followed. During these difficult years there was also a period when no expenditures were permitted on paintings for the Capitol.133 However, Meigs got back in touch with Leutze in March of 1861, and the men met once more on March 25. Leutze finished a large, elaborate compositional sketch (fig. 78) (now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum) on April 6, less than a week before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Simon Cameron, the new Republican secretary of war, refused to let the project go forward in May, but Meigs repleaded his case on June 20, and Cameron formally approved a new request on July 2. A contract was signed on July 9.134 The work was to go

into the huge stairwell in the House wing, and Leutze had decided to use a relatively new German muralpainting technique known as stereochromy, with a vitreous glaze that sought to imitate the finish of mosaic.135 He made a brief trip to the West, going as far as Colorado, for study purposes, and by late October of 1861 he was at work on the painting itself (fig. 79), which took a little more than a year to complete. The first six months involved preparing the wall and transferring the design of the composition; he began to add color only in April of 1862. The finished mural was unveiled without particular ceremony in the last days of November 1862.136 In addition to the Smithsonian sketch of April 6, 1861 (fig. 78), another sketch (now in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa) (fig. 80) survives.137 According to Raymond Stehle, the Gilcrease study contains one significantly different detail, in that among the various explorers of America rendered in the fictive painted frame of the work it includes John Frémont rather than Meriwether Lewis, who appears in the finished mural. The inclusion of Frémont, affirms Stehle, signified a more radical political approach—Frémont, who had been the Republican candidate for president in 1856, was more committed to abolition than Lincoln.138 In this view, the Gilcrease sketch is slightly earlier than the Smithsonian one, which reflects a “toning-down” by Meigs. Another scholar has argued that Frémont is not shown in the Gilcrease work and that it was made in mid-April, after the Smithsonian version.139 But for my purposes this dispute is not crucial, because neither of the sketches includes an African American figure. The finished work most certainly does: right in the lower part of the center of the composition is an African American youth (fig. 81), a nearly grown lad who affectionately leads forward a mule carrying a white mother and infant. All three of these figures appear only in the finished work.140

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f ig ur e 78 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861. Oil on canvas, 85.4 × 110.1 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., bequest of Sara Carr Upton. Photo: SAAM.

We do not know exactly when Leutze decided to add these three people and the mule to his composition. (The idea of placing an African American figure in the American wilderness is already present in Leutze’s 1852 Washington as Surveyor [fig. 70].) The African American youth in Westward was certainly there by June 27, 1862, as an article in the Washington, D.C., National Intelligencer of that date celebrated the informal contemporaneity of

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Leutze’s work in progress: “here a group of wistful mules; here oxen with patient faces, horses, boys, negroes, the heterogeneous sorts of camp equipage, all in motion, all moving toward the setting sun. . . . [A]nd it has this effect on us, that we not only felt proud to have such a picture in the country, but also felt proud to have such a country in the picture.”141 There is reason to think, as I argue below with internal evidence from the painting, that the insertion

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f igur e 79 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62. Stereochrome mural, about 6.1 × 9.1 m. House stairwell, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. Photo: Architect of the Capitol.

of the new figures was made between April and June of 1862. On April 15, at any rate, the slaves of Washington, D.C., had been freed by presidential decree, the first real emancipation of the war and one that was to lead quickly toward Lincoln’s decision to embrace a fuller emancipation at the end of the summer.142 Leutze’s African American pioneer turned up just as Lincoln and many of his advisors began to see that slavery had to end if the war were to be won, and the completed work was revealed to a full audience in the months between the Emancipation Proclamation itself (September 22, 1862) and the day it entered into force ( January 1, 1863).

Once Westward was on public display, other comments about its figure of color followed. The New York Evening Post had begun its coverage of Leutze’s mural in November of 1861, and on December 17, 1862, it ran a full description of the painting, which mentioned the mother and child “mounted on a mule led by a negro boy.”143 But two months earlier this newspaper had already laid out, in a meditation on the visual arts during wartime, some of the ideological underpinnings of Leutze’s mural and its African American character.

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f ig ur e 80 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861. Oil on canvas, 90 × 116.5 cm. From the collection of Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma Photo: Gilcrease Museum.

The painting of pictures of this genre [the anonymous critic had been referring to a “Bacchante”] seems to us sadly out of place in this generation, so crowded with incidents and great action. . . . We are not surprised, in the midst of the confusions and throes of war, that the fine arts languish; the war and its pre-occupations distract the minds of all from the gentle arts of peace. Yet there is much more to be said. It reflects little credit on our figure

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painters that they do not identify themselves with the great revolution which, with its contrasts of lurid lights and mournful depth of shadow, is passing before us. Let them in eloquent lines and vivid colors paint the history of to-day. Let them put aside their Topseys with platter and dust-pan, their Sambos with castanet and banjo. The black man to-day means liberty. Let the Bacchantes, Venuses, the Colignys, the imaginary and real horrors of the

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f ig ur e 8 1 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of group with African American youth. Photo: Architect of the Capitol.

past rest where they belong—in the past. By the fireside, in the street, on the battle-field, there are being enacted scenes of earnest import, outpourings of the grandest emotions of the soul. Here is material to incite and inspire the genius of Michael Angelo, of Decamps, of Vernet. Our artists should show themselves equal to the grandeur, the pathos and the ennobling sentiment of the times.144 While this is not exactly a call for “painters of modern life” in Baudelaire’s terms (that phrase was launched by the French critic toward the end of 1863), the focus on the changing meaning of African American subjects in

the passage above is highly significant. It characterizes both condescending comic genre and sentimentalized narrative illustration (Topsy is, of course, a personage in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) as outdated and inadequate to the stirring times. The critic goes on to praise not Leutze but the more unblinking realism of John Rogers’s 1859 The Slave Auction (see fig. 40). To be sure, Leutze’s African American pioneer still has traces of older modes of representation: his white teeth are visible, and the hint of a smile links him to minstrel and other genre representations (fig. 82), while his attachment to the darkbrown mule evokes the African American horsemen and grooms in Washington imagery (e.g., figs. 49–50)

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f ig ur e 82 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of African American youth. Photo: Architect of the Capitol.

as well as racist notions that blacks were in several ways closer to animals than were whites.145 But there can be no denying that Leutze’s African American youth is very much in pursuit of liberty, as are the other pioneers. He strides forward with purpose, and the mother (with her child) carried by the mule reads as a fellow traveler rather than as any kind of master.

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Just before its completion, Leutze himself prepared a series of notes on the mural, which were apparently widely disseminated and, like a kind of modern press release, served as the basis for several published accounts, such as that in the New York Evening Post of December 17 cited above. He describes the figures as follows: “a mother kissing her babe with tears of joy, mounted on a mule led by a negro boy who caresses the beast for the work done” in getting its passengers as well as baggage to the top of the pass.146 The art critic Henry Tuckerman’s 1867 short biography of Leutze in his Book of the Artists includes a very similar passage: “Below these, mounted on a mule which is led by a negro boy, is a mother, who kisses, with tears of joy in her eyes, the babe on her bosom.”147 But in 1868, in an essay in Lippincott’s Magazine published a few months after the artist’s untimely death, the journalist and novelist Anne Brewster reported that Leutze intended a particular meaning for both the muleteer and the mother. She had been speaking with the artist about Westward in the spring of 1868. “There is a group almost in the center of your picture—a young Irish woman seated on an ass holding a child—the ass is led by a negro. Did you not mean this group to teach a new gospel to this continent, a new truth which this part of the world is to accept—that the Emigrant and the Freedman are the two great elements which are to be reconciled and worked with? . . . In the flush of his pleasure he told me I was the first American that had understood his picture.”148 In fact, she soon learned, others had reached the same conclusion and been told by the artist that they were correct.

joh n h ay

Brewster’s account offers a key piece of evidence in disclosing what was meant by this pictorial addition.

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f ig ur e 8 3 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of “john hay inve” inscription. Photo: Architect of the Capitol.

But Leutze failed to reveal to Brewster an even more important clue about his motivation—a clue that he left hiding in plain sight in the picture itself. The African American youth wears a wide yellow strap to hold up his trousers, and on the strap are inscribed in red these words: “john hay inve” (fig. 83). Leutze nowhere in his own statements called attention to this inscription, and because the picture is so large and painted on the walls of a stairwell, it is by no means easy to make out with the naked eye. Recent conservation measures that required scaffolding made it possible to notice the

words.149 Like other artists unaccustomed to working on the colossal scale needed in a mural decoration, Leutze may have misjudged the readability of his inscription, or he may not have cared that it was hard to see, because it was a kind of in-joke shared with a few of his friends in Washington. I lean toward the latter option, but in any event the inscription, with its Latin abbreviation for invenit (invented), is a learned footnote that confirms the political meaning of the African American figure. The term invenit had been common for several centuries in printmaking, where it

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was used to identify the artist who designed an image, as opposed to the engraver who cut it. But Leutze was not a printmaker or a copyist (except of his own work), and John Hay was not a visual artist at all. With this phrase Leutze attributes to John Hay not the design of his African American youth, but rather the very idea of including him. John Hay (1838–1905), seen from the perspective of his long and distinguished career, was one of the more influential American statesmen and authors of the later nineteenth century. He is known today primarily as having been secretary of state under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt (1898–1905) and as co-author of the first comprehensive biography of Abraham Lincoln (which first appeared in serial format in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine beginning in 1886).150 However, in 1862, when Leutze wrote Hay’s name on the mural in the House stairway, Hay was a young man of twenty-four, more than two decades younger than Leutze. Hay looked even younger than his age—one visitor to the White House said he appeared to be about seventeen—but he was a clever, well-educated, charming, and ambitious young man.151 The son of a doctor, he had grown up on the Illinois frontier and by the age of twelve was reading Virgil in Latin. He attended Brown and then entered the field of law through his uncle, an attorney who had worked with Lincoln. Hay was quickly drafted to work on the latter phase of Lincoln’s presidential campaign and rewarded with a position as assistant to his barely older Illinois friend John Nicolay, who had become President Lincoln’s private secretary. Hay was particularly charged with managing Lincoln’s correspondence. Hay and Nicolay were at the president’s beck and call around the clock and shared a simple bedroom in the White House itself. Their intense exposure to Lincoln right through the war was the basis for the voluminous biography they wrote several decades later. 140

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By the time Leutze began work in the Capitol, in October of 1861, Hay had settled into his demanding and fascinating job at the White House. How the two first met we do not know for certain, but it may be significant that Hay’s friend and close colleague John Nicolay was also a German immigrant. Nicolay had been born in 1832 in Essingen, near Landau in the Palatinate, and in 1838 had moved with his father to the United States.152 In any case, as of December 21, 1861, Hay thought highly of Leutze, and the two men were no doubt already acquainted. On that date Hay wrote to Albert Bierstadt, another German-born American painter and a former colleague of Leutze’s in Düsseldorf: “Leutze is still very busy upon his cartoons for his great picture in the Capitol. It will be a wonderful work when he completes it.”153 On April 13 and May 25, 1862—by which time Leutze had begun to apply color to his mural—two enthusiastic pieces about Leutze and his painting in progress were published in the Washington Sunday Morning Chronicle, and both have been persuasively attributed to Hay.154 By this time, in addition to managing the president’s correspondence, Hay was writing a number of unsigned journalistic articles. Although it is unclear to what extent they were authorized by Lincoln or Nicolay, many certainly were meant to reinforce the president’s positions. Hay came from a fervently antislavery family and had as a child experienced a moving encounter with a fugitive slave.155 Nevertheless, in the spring and early summer of 1862 several of his unsigned columns (for the Missouri Republican) argued against radical abolitionist positions advocating an immediate end to slavery and instead hewed to the political line Lincoln was still publicly expressing that the war was about union and not slavery.156 Once the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, however, Hay’s anonymous column immediately endorsed it with vigor.157 It is hard to say whether the earlier tepid views about

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emancipation were Hay’s personal opinions. On July 20, writing to Mary Jay, the young daughter of the New York antislavery figure John Jay II, Hay affirmed that he had supported General Hunter’s abortive attempt to emancipate slaves in three Southern states in May and that Lincoln’s position was shifting: “The President himself has been, out of pure devotion to what he considers the best interests of humanity, the bulwark of the institution he abhors, for a year. But he will not conserve slavery much longer. When next he speaks in relation to this defiant and ungrateful villainy it will be with no uncertain sound. Even now he speaks more boldly and sternly to slaveholders than to the world. If I have sometimes been impatient of his delay I am so no longer.”158 Thus, by the time of the first full documentary proof of Leutze and Hay’s friendship—the men went riding together on August 27, 1862—Hay’s position on emancipation was clear.159 Hay probably encouraged a willing Leutze to include an African American figure in the mural to mark the Emancipation Proclamation. In a reminiscence about Leutze written in 1870, Hay mentions his friend’s “crabbed wit,” and the footnote-like presence of the “john hay inve” inscription in the picture may be an instance of this.160 One must wonder, of course, whether Lincoln or any other members of his administration were aware of the inscription. On October 10, 1862, Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward signed off on a much-sought-after commission for the painter’s son Eugene as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, then in Newport, Rhode Island.161 Eugene Leutze was formally admitted there the following March and went on to have a fine career as an admiral. He later recalled that his father had told him that Lincoln had come to watch him paint Westward and that his own commission was partly in exchange for some reduction in charges for the mural.162 Leutze certainly had dealings with Seward, to

whom he gave the sketch of the Westward composition now in the Smithsonian (fig. 78).163 That the young John Hay approved of forward-looking and even provocative images of African Americans is demonstrated by the curious case of one of the first and, artistically, the best of the memorial medals to Lincoln (fig. 84) produced after his assassination. The medal was a project begun in May of 1865 by French republicans, led by veterans of 1848 (including the brother of François Arago, the revolutionary cabinet minister who had ended slavery in the French colonies) and supported by Victor Hugo. An experienced medalist with left-wing affiliations, Franky Magniadas, was hired to produce the design.164 The obverse is a portrait of Lincoln, while the reverse contains a striking

f ig ur e 8 4 Franky Magniadas, Lincoln medal, 1866, reverse. Gold, diameter: 3 ¼ in. Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln Papers, Series 4 addenda, 1774– 1948. Photo: Library of Congress.

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composition that deserves to be better known. A rectangular tomb capped with a pyramid bears a laudatory inscription: “Lincoln the honest man abolished slavery, reestablished the Union, saved the Republic, without shrouding the statue of Liberty. He was assassinated on April 14, 1865. Liberty—Equality—Fraternity.”165 A lightly dressed winged female genius at the left (without any particular marks of ethnic identity) holds a wreath as she mourns; behind her are emblems of maritime trade—an anchor, a bale of goods (cotton?), and a steamship. On the right side, in front of a locomotive and a ballot box, stand an African American man and an adolescent boy. Both are shirtless and barefoot, and their simple garments below the waist suggest the garb of slaves. But neither behaves like a bondsman. The boy holds a martyr’s palm, which he offers to the president’s tomb, but under his other arm is a large book, alluding to the intensive efforts already being made to educate the newly free population.166 The man gestures toward the American-eagle emblem at the top, but his other hand rests on a rifle with a fixed bayonet, denoting the crucial contribution of black soldiers in the just-completed conflict. The ballot box to their right is another vital element. Taken together, these iconographic features articulate a remarkable vision of African Americans transformed into engaged models of republican citizens. As in the U.S. memorials to Lincoln, a broad-based public collection was taken up in France for the cost of the medal. The imperial French regime of Napoleon III then tried to suppress the project, so it had to be produced in Geneva and was not finished until 1866. There was an intention to present the original gold version of the medal directly to Mary Todd Lincoln, but this ran into difficulties, and instead it was consigned to the American minister in Paris, John Bigelow. By this time John Hay had become secretary to the American legation in Paris, and he wrote to Lincoln’s son Robert

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as follows: “I think [the medal] is a beautiful work of art, while as the expression of an earnest and heartfelt sentiment it is unsurpassed.”167 It eventually reached Mrs. Lincoln and is today in the Library of Congress; other copies in bronze and silver were produced in some numbers. Hay’s views about race, it must be acknowledged, were contradictory and changeable, and in some ways they mirrored the general trend among important Republicans who came of age during the Civil War.168 Hay was never well disposed toward Native Americans. In one of his unsigned columns, of April 20, 1862, he notes that thirty years previously there had been much sympathy for the Cherokees and other Indian tribes, “but now the red men are lost sight of in the desire to ameliorate the condition of the black man.”169 It is somewhat ironic that the woman on the mule in Leutze’s picture was meant to signify an Irish immigrant, because Hay (though not Leutze) soon became virulently hostile to the Irish, with the Irish American participation in the 1863 draft riots (which targeted African Americans) perhaps having had an impact on his views. Hay also developed a strong prejudice against Hispanics in his later years.170 His more admiring view of African Americans lasted into the 1880s. He published a poem in Harper’s Weekly in 1871 celebrating a black Civil War soldier who bravely rescues the white soldier/narrator of the piece.171 In 1879 he was of some assistance to African American migrants to the Midwest, an initiative that comes closest to the thrust of Leutze’s imagery, and in his biography of Lincoln, black troops and African Americans in general are handled with respect. He may have invested large sums in the construction of housing for the African American poor in Washington, though this has not been confirmed.172 By 1900, however, he was using pejorative language about African Americans, and his years as an influential cabinet member in the McKinley and Roosevelt

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administrations were not marked by any particular positive initiatives toward people of color.173 When the aging secretary of state Hay made his way up the stairs of the House wing of the Capitol around 1900, he surely did not forget to admire once again his friend Leutze’s western panorama, but one wonders whether he winced or took pleasure as he recalled the inscription of his name on the strap of the African American youth. There is no evidence he ever disclosed its existence to his friends or the public. The inscription remains a curiosity, and we must continue to speculate whether it affirmed for the mural a political authority that went right up to the presidential administration, or was an in-joke for a narrow group, or both.

l eutz e and t he m ag i

Up to this point, the present discussion of Westward has hardly touched on the strong links binding American and European attitudes toward people of color in this period. Unlike the Crossing, Westward was a work produced in the United States, and the context for the African American figure I have so far supplied emphasizes the American political vicissitudes of the 1850s and early 1860s. The mural itself is a vision (and in some ways not an entirely inaccurate one) of the American future. An article praising the picture in the Daily National Republican of January 15, 1863, calls it “purely American.” The journalist continues: “He has borrowed no robes from the past, stolen nothing from the classics, ignored knee-buckles, cocked hats and antiquated togas.”174 That, however, is not quite right. In 1867 a more astute critic, the aforementioned Henry Tuckerman, noted that the elaborate border of the mural, which on the left and right extends to strips on the adjoining walls, was “a playful introduction, as it were, to the history of emigration.”175 It is beyond the scope of this study to trace all of the elements in

this painted frame, or border, but several are relevant to my focus. One of the more bizarre features of Westward is that Native Americans are entirely absent from the main panoramic field, as if the American West had never been inhabited by indigenous peoples, or perhaps implying that they had already “melted” away. Part of Leutze’s intent here may have been to avoid any hint of armed conflict in the main field, since the picture was meant to turn attention away from the violence of the present civil conflict and toward an ideal future. Native American figures are, however, visible in the framing band at the top of the mural, where at right one flees from a Christian missionary and at left one launches an arrow toward a white pioneer. The interspersion of these figures with animals and swirling plant forms is reminiscent of both European medieval decoration and classical and Renaissance “grotesques.” There are also human figures whose lower bodies merge into the organic forms of vines: two of these seem to be Native Americans, due to the feathery forms on their heads, while the other two are white settlers, with ax and hoe clearing and cultivating the land. In the center of this top band (fig. 85) the American eagle, from which the rays of a shining sun emanate, embraces with its wings two half-nude, uncertainly gendered figures who clasp hands: an embodiment of Union, holding the fasces, and a figure of Liberty, with the rod and liberty cap.176 In the context of Jefferson Davis’s successful effort to prevent both the liberty cap and the fasces from appearing atop the Capitol dome, this is surely a significant detail: Leutze is symbolically placing his vision of American destiny in the West under the signs of the current war’s great causes, the maintenance of the Union and the end of slavery. Neither of these allegorical figures appears in the 1861 sketches, and the Liberty holding rod and cap is on the same vertical axis as the African American muleteer. The bottom band’s vista of the Golden Gate and the side roundels of William Clark and Daniel Boone

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f ig ur e 85 Capitol.

Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of eagle in the border. Photo: Architect of the

allude to recent exploration and “discovery.” But nearly everything else on the side panels of the frame alludes to classical, biblical, and Renaissance prototypes for the central scene. Columbus with his ships is an obvious choice at the left, but many of the other vignettes are more unexpected and ingenious. Moses, who led his people to the Promised Land, and the Greek hero Jason, pursuing the Golden Fleece far from home, are two good examples. Hercules, parting the Gates of Hercules leading west to the Atlantic, appears at the upper right, but the most interesting group for my purposes is that of the Magi, who are represented at the very top of the left band (fig. 86). Though some changes in the overall design of the border were made between the two 1861 sketches and the completion of the mural, the group of the Three Magi, also known as Wise Men or Kings, was already present in both sketches. Much embellished during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the story

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of the Magi is derived from a passage in the Gospel of Matthew. The scene shown here is not their adoration of the Christ child but rather the less frequently shown earlier moment in which the Magi—the term is connected with astrology—first see the miraculous star that then guides them to Bethlehem. The physical wall on which they are painted runs from east to west (something that a person living in the relentlessly gridded capital city would easily realize), and so the Magi seem to move in that direction, led by the star. The central panorama of the composition is of course on the west wall of the stairwell: Westward is a kind of fictive pictorial window literally to the west of the viewer. One of the few details provided about the Magi in Matthew is that they “came from the East,” and their westward trip here prefigures the destined taming of the American frontier. Leutze’s own notes describe the Magi as “following the star to the west.”177 An alternative title for the mural used

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by both Leutze and his fellow artist John Ferguson Weir was in fact Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way, which reinforces the importance of the Magi vignette.178 By Leutze’s day, and in fact long before it, one of the Three Magi was normatively and consistently shown as a black African (already discussed in chapter 1 above; see figs. 5–6).179 The Gospel of Matthew says nothing of this or of any other ethnic identity of the Magi—Matthew does not even say how many of them there were or whether they differed in age—but beginning in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries European artists and writers began to show one of the three as having dark skin and African features. This iconographic development began in Germany, though by the early 1500s it had been universally adopted throughout western Europe. (By this time it had become well understood that the Magi were kings as well as sages, that they were a trio of varying ages, and that their kingdoms were distant from one another.) Several earlier American depictions of the Magi include an African Wise Man, though it was not an especially widespread subject in the colonies or the new nation.180 Leutze, though himself raised a Protestant, was knowledgeable about Catholic imagery, and there were at least three images of the Magi to be seen in his native Gmünd (e.g., fig. 87)—all with a black African Magus as part of the group.181 In these images, as is usually but not quite always the case, the youngest of the three Magi is the African one, and the two older figures have pale skin and are bearded. This is the system Leutze employs, but he makes one interesting tweak: whereas in earlier European art the older, paler Magi take precedence of place over the young black one, in Leutze’s grouping it is the young, beardless Magus who is closest to the holy star. Varied skin color, however, is not a feature of Leutze’s image of the Magi, because the greater part of the border is in a restricted palette, and all the human

figures are painted in grisaille (monochrome) almost as if they were sculptural reliefs. In this system, darker skin color would only read as shadow, and Leutze avoids it. Grisaille is in fact a common feature of the peripheral zones of mural decorations in the Renaissance. But a careful inspection of Leutze’s youngest Magus reveals African features in the profile form of lips and nose and the tightly curled hair, which contrasts with the longer locks of the older Magi. The beardlessness of the youngest Magus (unlike his companions) is the norm for African Magi in European art, and he wears an earring. As shown previously, in other contexts, the

f ig ur e 8 6 Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861–62 (fig. 79), detail of Magi in the border. Photo: Architect of the Capitol.

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f ig ur e 87

Adoration of the Magi, 1630. Oil on canvas. Münster, Schwäbisch Gmünd. Photo: Heidrun Irre.

earring was a traditional marker of African identity in European art and in some American examples as well, not the least of which is Leutze’s own black oarsman in Washington Crossing the Delaware. In addition to the African American muleteer, then, there is also an African figure in Westward, and this character already turns up in the 1861 sketches for the composition, though his ethnicity is more apparent in the Smithsonian than in the Gilcrease study. Leutze does not seem to have had occasion to represent the Magi in other compositions, but we do know that he was open to images of Africans in biblical subjects.

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Leutze’s 1853 drawing of David and Saul (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) includes two black African servants.182 Though a black Magus among the set of three was then the norm in both Europe and the United States, there are occasional exceptions. In Thomas Crawford’s designs for an image of the Magi and shepherds in the 1840s,183 his classicized Wise Men differ neither in age nor ethnicity. But Edmonia Lewis produced a now-lost sculptural relief of the Magi with the traditional ethnic array for an African American Episcopal church in Baltimore. A reference to this work in the Woman’s Journal of 1883 notes that she gave pride

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of place to the African Magus: “Miss Edmonia Lewis has completed at her studio in Rome a fine bas-relief in white marble, for a church in Baltimore, her native city. It represents the Magi adoring the infant Jesus, and of the three the African is given greater prominence than either the Caucasian or the Asiatic.”184 The Baltimore Sun likewise noticed the unusual emphasis on the African character. Reporting on the arrival of the relief in New York, the newspaper affirmed that as “a compliment to the race worshiping in the church for which the piece is intended, the African King is given the greatest prominence.”185 This leading role for the African Wise Man is rare in European art, and both Leutze’s and Lewis’s decisions to go against tradition in this detail are thus significant. The center of the top band of Leutze’s border is dominated by the mural’s elaborately inscribed title, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” This is a quotation from a famous poem, “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” written in 1726 by the Anglo-Irish philosopher and divine George Berkeley (also called Bishop Berkeley). Born in 1685, Berkeley began to project a grand educational scheme for the New World in the 1720s, which resulted not only in the poem but also a stay of three years (1728–31) near Newport, Rhode Island, while he was awaiting funding for a college to be founded in Bermuda. This came to naught, and Berkeley returned to Britain.186 Four years after Leutze’s mural was completed, the founders of the University of California, with Berkeley’s poem and educational project in mind, named their site after him, and in a curious coincidence this site may be visible in the center of the bottom border’s panorama looking through the Golden Gate into San Francisco Bay.187 The poem foresees a fifth great and cultivated empire in the Americas, to follow more gloriously in the footsteps of the earlier Mediterranean and European ones. The title of Leutze’s mural is

taken from the first line of the last stanza of the poem. Leutze surely knew something of Berkeley, but the racial politics of his picture are not similar to the philosopher’s. Berkeley idealized Native Americans and hoped to educate them on Bermuda, but he defended the enslavement of Africans as consonant with Christian practice and owned several slaves during his stay in Rhode Island.188 Though the poem mentions the sun and a “heavenly flame,” it does not refer to any star. However, in 1802 John Quincy Adams misquoted Berkeley in a published version of an oration given at Plymouth, Massachusetts, replacing “course” with “star”: “Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way.”189 This subsequently became a well-known variant of the phrase, and Leutze’s mural was given that alternative title in several early notices of the work (as discussed above). A signal use of this particular phrase from shortly before the execution of Leutze’s mural is found in the fugitive slave David Dorr’s 1858 memoir of travel in Europe and the Middle East, A Colored Man Round the World. At the end of his introduction, Dorr recounts his escape from slavery after he returned from his trip abroad with his owner. He “fled . . . westward, where the ‘star of empire takes its way,’” thus ingeniously refashioning an imperial vision into one of personal liberation.190 It may be that Dorr was also thinking here of the Southern fugitive slave’s need to focus on another heavenly body, the North Star. This aid to a fugitive’s navigation had become emblematic in antislavery circles by 1840, and in 1847 Frederick Douglass took it for the name of his first abolitionist newspaper. A particularly interesting fusion of the North Star, as the fugitive’s beacon, with the Star of Bethlehem, followed by the Magi, appears in a poem published in the Anglo-African on September 19, 1863, just before the first anniversary of the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. The poem’s author, William Slade, was an African American

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businessman and leader who at the time held the position of “lead servant” in the White House. Slade seems to have acted as liaison between the black community in Washington and the Lincoln administration, and he also chaired a committee to support fugitive slaves from the South who reached the city. His poem is entitled “The Slave to His Star,” and after celebrating God’s gift of the North Star, “Freedom’s high watchfire,” he goes on to say that for slaves it is like the star that led to Christ: “My race from midnight look to thee, / As Bethlehem’s star art thou to them.”191 Also relevant to Dorr’s formulation is a widely distributed African American song about the flight from slavery, which includes this stanza: “Massa gave me a holiday, and said he’d give me more, / I thanked him very kindly, and shoved my boat from shore; / I drifted down the river, my heart was light and free. / I had my eye on the bright north star, and thought of liberty.” The song was popular among Union partisans after the Civil War, and the very young Theodore Roosevelt, on holiday himself, sang it with his family as they rode the train from Pisa to Rome in 1869.192 All this is to suggest that the association of stars with the Magi and emancipation are relevant to Leutze’s idea of the mural and to a number of those who admired it. At the extreme lower left and right of the composition are two further inscriptions, sets of verse that require some consideration. The one at the right (“The spirit moves with its allotted spaces, / The mind is narrowed in a narrow sphere”) has an unmistakable expansionist meaning and is adapted (perhaps by Leutze himself ) from Friedrich Schiller’s 1798 prologue to his tragedy Wallerstein. This drama is set during the Thirty Years’ War, which for Leutze would have had an obvious correspondence to the American Civil War, and Schiller’s next stanza, after the one quoted from, defines mastery and freedom as the things worth fighting for and encourages art to address these themes.193 One of 148

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the poems in the 1847 collection of William Cullen Bryant’s works for which Leutze had designed illustrations, “The Death of Schiller,” describes the German poet as having a vision of boundless travel—including to “the New World’s forest streams”—on his deathbed.194 The inscription at the lower left is likewise from a text attached to a play: “No pent up Utica / Contracts our Powers / but the whole boundles[s] / Continent is ours.” This is a very slightly altered passage from a verse composed by Jonathan Mitchell Sewall (1748–1808), part of a patriotic epilogue to Joseph Addison’s Cato, which was performed at a theater in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1778.195 Leutze probably encountered it in a further republication in The Cyclopaedia of American Literature, a two-volume anthology edited by Evert and George Duyckinck in 1855, but pieces of the poem were also excerpted in an 1861 periodical as well.196 The lines quoted by Leutze are immediately followed, in the full poem, by these: “Rouse up, for shame! your brethren slain in war, Or groaning now in ignominious bondage, Point at their wounds and chains, and cry aloud To battle!” Leutze does not include these further verses, but he surely knew them. The mural itself excluded the violence of the Civil War, but this kind of learned allusion to the war over slavery would have played well to a literate insider such as Hay and perhaps others of Leutze’s circle. While Sewall’s poem anchors a strand of Leutze’s spectacle in classical culture, this discussion of those details of Leutze’s Westward that can be associated with people of color must return to biblical narrative. In 1868 Anne Brewster had affirmed, with the artist’s endorsement, that central elements of his work were also rooted in scripture—that the group comprising

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the African American youth, the pack animal, and its cargo of mother and child was meant “to teach a new gospel to this continent . . . [about] the Emigrant and the Freedman.”197 The reference to the gospel here also suggests one of the conceptual and formal sources for Leutze’s late addition of this group: the story of the Flight into Egypt, in which the Holy Family flees Herod’s soon-to-unfold massacre of children and emigrates (once again) west into Egypt. European Christian artists had long illustrated this story, following the brief indications in Matthew that follow immediately on that Evangelist’s episode of the Magi. Those verses do not mention a beast of burden, but the medieval and Renaissance visual imagination soon provided a donkey or mule to carry the Madonna and Child, as in Giotto’s composition in the Arena Chapel in Padua (fig. 88). Dark-skinned figures had no place in this traditional imagery of the Flight, and Leutze’s transformation of it is intriguing, as the muleteer substitutes for Joseph. The scriptural antecedent for the group reinforces the link between the African American in the foreground and the African Magus in the vignette in the border. Leutze, then, played an important role in breaking down the taboos against the depiction of people of black-African descent in the U.S. Capitol. The temporary exhibition of his Washington Crossing the Delaware (fig. 43) in 1851 had created the first breach in this unspoken exclusionary practice. Brumidi’s 1857 Cornwallis (fig. 76) consolidated that gain, but only with a marginal figure, whereas Leutze’s 1862 Westward included both a central and a peripheral African character, neither of whom could be understood as enslaved. Not until 1871 did Randolph Rogers’s allegorical Africa appear on the rotunda doors, but once again this was a peripheral figure.198 It was, to be sure, the first image of a woman of color in the Capitol, but its lack of any clear connection to the great events of the day diminished its significance. But other ideas,

some probably encouraged by Leutze’s muleteer, were afoot. Harriet Beecher Stowe capped her lengthy appreciation of Sojourner Truth in the April 1863 issue of Atlantic Monthly with praise of William Wetmore Story’s statues of Cleopatra (see fig. 41) and the Libyan Sibyl (see fig. 33), and the last sentence of Stowe’s essay proposed that both sculptures soon be exhibited at the Capitol.199 In 1864 the critic James Jackson Jarves had another provocative idea for a sculptural display: he much admired John Quincy Adams Ward’s 1863 Freedman (fig. 89), a small but vigorous bronze work without any hint of subordination, and proposed that it be rendered in heroic scale and displayed at the Capitol to “commemorate the crowning virtue of democratic institutions in the final liberty of the slave.”200 But neither of these proposals came to pass. The continuing use

f ig ur e 8 8 Giotto, Flight into Egypt, 1304–6. Fresco. Arena Chapel, Padua. Photo: author.

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bootblacks at leisure.201 But none of these remained in the building. Well into Reconstruction, Leutze’s young muleteer on the House stairwell remained the primary figurative embodiment of African American identity within the Capitol.

l eu t z e ’s c iv i l war pictur e s an d pr o j ec t s

f ig ur e 89 John Quincy Adams Ward, Freedman, 1863. Bronze, 49.5 cm high. Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of Mr. Ernest Kanzler, 45.5. Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts.

of the Capitol rotunda as a temporary display space did from time to time result in some interesting juxtapositions. For example, in February of 1867, at the height of Reconstruction, three very different pictures with African American characters were hung there: Thomas Rossiter and Louis Rémy Mignot’s Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784 (1859) (fig. 90), with two of Washington’s enslaved domestics in the foreground and middle ground; Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (1865–66) (fig. 91), the antislavery statement of a former Confederate soldier; and Frank Buchser’s American Blacklegs (1866) (fig. 92), a visiting Swiss artist’s genre evocation of African American 150

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Only a few months after the completion of Westward the Course of Empire, Leutze found the opportunity to depict another African American character. Throughout his career Leutze also worked as a portraitist, and in April of 1863 he completed a likeness of General Ambrose Burnside (fig. 93), by then the commander of the Army of the Potomac.202 Burnside posed for the artist in New York, and the picture is a large, full-length work dominated by the general in a finely tailored uniform and featuring his famous facial hair (sideburns, derived from his name). He holds binoculars, which perhaps are meant to allude to the spyglass held by Washington in Leutze’s Crossing (fig. 44). In the background is a view of Burnside’s troops crossing a stone bridge on the battlefield of Antietam (September 17, 1862) after a tremendous struggle. Burnside’s famously spirited and difficult horse, Major, is calmly held in check by a dark-skinned soldier who stands behind and to the left of the general but is still a conspicuous feature of the composition. This figure harks back to earlier pictorial traditions embodied by the two ca. 1780 portraits of Washington with an African American groom by Trumbull and Le Paon (see figs. 49–50). The portrait of Burnside also has echoes of Van Dyck’s celebrated portrait of Charles I in the Louvre and of Sully’s Passage of the Delaware (fig. 45). But the decision to include an African American soldier in Burnside was nevertheless a curious one. African American soldiers were not involved in the Battle of Antietam. Burnside

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f ig ur e 9 0 Thomas Rossiter and Louis Rémy Mignot, Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784, 1859. Oil on canvas, 221 × 372.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on extended loan to Mount Vernon. Bequest of William Nelson, 1905 (05.35). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

f ig ur e 9 1 Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis, after 1875 (artist’s copy after a lost original of 1865–66). Oil on canvas. Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, 1939.3.1. Photo: Missouri Historical Society.

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f ig ur e 92

Frank Buchser, American Blacklegs, 1866. Oil on canvas. Gottfried Keller Foundation, Bern. Photo: SIK-ISEA, Zurich.

is not known to have had an African American aide or groom, and his views about emancipation and especially black troops were, until well after the date of the portrait, decidedly cool.203 The bloody Union victory at Antietam was followed, five days later, by the Emancipation Proclamation, and when this came into force, on January 1, 1863, the first attempts to raise African American units quickly began. Perhaps Leutze and Burnside agreed that the figure would usefully allude to the new initiatives then being pursued, while (from

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Burnside’s point of view) emphasizing the traditionally subordinated position of the black groom. This figure has a stalwart stance, but his face seems to emerge from the head of the chestnut horse. He is also relegated to a kind of domestic service rather than authorized to enter the real combat transpiring further back in the picture. The portrait was in fact not commissioned by Burnside himself, but rather by friends and supporters in his adopted state of Rhode Island. Rhode Island had even had a regiment mostly composed of black troops

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Fig ur e 9 3 Emanuel Leutze, General Ambrose Burnside, 1863. Oil on canvas, 335 × 244 cm. State House, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo: Shterna Goldbloom.

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in the Revolutionary War, and a new unit of this kind was beginning to mobilize there in early 1863.204 The African American figure would have played rather well to an audience in Providence. Leutze, however, soon had other and more innovative ideas about the representation of African Americans, as manifested in four works from the last years of his career (1864–68). Two still exist, though they have received little attention from scholars; a third, known only by its title, is lost; and the fourth was never brought close to completion, though a verbal description survives of a lost compositional study of its grand plan. These works are interesting in their own right, and they also shed light on Westward and the evolution of the artist’s views about African Americans. Having finished Westward at the end of 1862, Leutze remained in Washington for a few months, probably to gauge reaction to the mural and to bask in its success. Unfortunately, government patronage for the ornamentation of the Capitol had largely shut down by this juncture, so it was not the time to seek another similar commission. Apart from his eldest son, Eugene, who had reached the United States in January of 1863 to pursue his naval commission, Leutze had not seen his family since 1859, and in May he left for Düsseldorf. Perhaps he was unsure whether he would soon return, but Union victories in the summer of 1863 stabilized the situation, and by October he was to recross the Atlantic with his wife and children.205 In the meantime he was not averse to being fêted by his old friends in the Malkasten, the Düsseldorf artists’ club he had helped to found. They put on a grand banquet for 150 persons in his honor, and the New York Evening Post reported that “two of the [local] artists had arrayed themselves, one as a Negro, the other as an Indian; and these brought in the first dishes, and handed them to Leutze.”206 This was obviously an allusion to his American career and perhaps more specifically to some of the

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details in his recently completed mural. The Malkasten members were known for the performance of costumed sketches, including a tableau vivant of Washington Crossing the Delaware.207 Once he and his family had returned to the United States, Leutze divided his time between Washington and New York. In the latter city Leutze was counted as one of the founders of an important and fashionable new association, the Union League Club. His name appears in the second group of members, recorded on January 1, 1864, soon after his return from Germany.208 Many wealthy and influential New Yorkers were members, and the club’s initial focus was on supporting the Union army by helping to raise two African American regiments, the New York Twentieth and Twenty-Sixth. This initiative was in turn partly a response to the draft riots of the previous summer, and the role of the Union League Club and its women’s auxiliary in raising and equipping the regiments was attacked by Copperhead New Yorkers in terms alluding to the specter of miscegenation.209 Leutze designed the regiments’ banners, and those of the Twentieth Regiment were presented at a grand and quite formal ceremony on March 6. A club publication from later in the year characterized the artist’s contribution: “These colors were of the most elegant description. The regimental flag was most elaborately embroidered from a beautiful and original design, furnished by Leutze, the artist, whose love of freedom is only surpassed by his genius.”210 A print in the widely circulated Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (fig. 94) recorded the ceremony, which took place in Union Square, and the club still owns a small painting by Edward Lamson Henry of the event, executed in 1869.211 The less elaborate banners of the Twenty-Sixth have survived, but all we know of Leutze’s designs for the Twentieth come from a New York Times piece transcribing the speeches made

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f ig ur e 94 The Union League Club Presenting Banners to the 20th New York Regiment, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 26, 1864, 4. Engraving. Photo: author.

at the event: “The conquering eagle and the broken yoke and the armed figure of Liberty, speak as plainly as symbols can of the might of Freedom and of the overthrow of Slavery.”212 Its inscribed motto was “God and Liberty.” The eagle and personification of liberty are slightly reminiscent of the allegorical figures at the center of the top border of Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire (fig. 85). Leutze also designed a flag for the Sanitary Commission, whose April 1864 fair raised money for the war effort, presented at the close of the fair to General John A. Dix, under whose

auspices the black regiments had been formed.213 While Leutze’s banner designs, it must be admitted, are timid in comparison to a more extensive set designed in roughly the same period for ten black regiments by the Philadelphia African American artist David Bustill Bowser (1820–1900), they nevertheless signal his enthusiasm for the raising of African American troops and his willingness to be identified with them.214 As the father of a young naval ensign in the Union forces, Leutze was hardly unconscious of the carnage underway. In February of 1864, even as he was

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working on the banner for the Twentieth Regiment, he was also producing a murky image of war’s less glamorous side, usually known as The Angel of the Battlefield (fig. 95). The work depicts the grim debris of a battle, filled with the dead and dying, presided over

f ig ur e 95 Emanuel Leutze, The Angel of the Battlefield, 1864. Oil on canvas, 79.1 × 60 cm. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. Museum purchase with funds provided by Joan and Macon Brock, the Christiane and James Valone Charitable Fund, Shirley and Dick Roberts, David and Susan Goode, Mr. Joseph T. Waldo and Ms. Ashby Vail, Dr. and Mrs. T. W. Hubbard, Mickey and David Jester, Kay and Al Abiouness, Mr. and Mrs. Emanuel A. Arias, Angelica and Henry Light, Ed and Linda Lilly, Leah and Richard Waitzer, Nancy and Malcom Branch, Kathy and Bob Carter, Mr. Leslie H. Freidman and Mrs. Janet H. Hamlin, Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus W. Grandy V, and Tom and Carol Anne Kent, 2012.14. Photo: Chrysler Museum of Art.

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by a radiant angel recording the names of the fallen. The technique is deliberately rough, though the overall structure harks back to Renaissance compositions like Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin. The uniforms and weapons are a curious mix from the nation’s first war and its current one, and at the right is a battle flag of the sort Leutze was then designing, but none of the figures is African American.215 Nothing is known of the early ownership of the picture, but Leutze’s comrades in the Union League Club—perhaps a father who had already lost a son in the war—would surely have found it of interest. Less than a year later, as the war began to wind down, another new Leutze picture on a related theme was mentioned in the New York Evening Post. On February 7, 1865, the paper reported on a small but choice exhibition of paintings at the Century Club.216 This association had been founded in part by William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the Post and an old acquaintance of Leutze’s. Leutze’s picture on display was entitled Union Refugees, and when it was shown again at the Brooklyn Art Association exhibition in March, it was listed as Escape of Refugees.217 The work is unknown today, but it is highly probable that this image depicted the flight of southern fugitive slaves (“contrabands,” as they were then often called) toward areas controlled by the Union army, a frequent phenomenon throughout the war. Perhaps some idea of it can be gained from the work of another politically progressive German American immigrant, Theodor Kaufmann, whose 1867 On to Liberty (fig. 96) depicts African American women and children making their way toward Union lines.218 Just a few months later Leutze created another picture focused on current events, a signed and dated 1865 portrait of Abraham Lincoln (fig. 97). This painting today belongs to the Union League Club and ornaments one of the club’s larger rooms.219 Though the club was soon to commission a life-size portrait of John

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f ig ur e 96 Theodor Kaufmann, On to Liberty, 1867. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 142.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Erving and Joyce Wolf, 1982 (1982.443.3). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

Brown from the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, Leutze’s Lincoln arrived there by a more circuitous route.220 It was commissioned by Edward Haight (1817–1885), a wealthy New York banker and politician who belonged to the faction known as the War Democrats, members of the Democratic Party who nevertheless warmly embraced Lincoln’s position after the conflict began. Haight had a son in the Union army, and he is known to have enthusiastically supported the emancipation of the slaves in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1862. He had corresponded with Lincoln, and already in April of 1862 he was a friend of John Hay, through

whom he may have met Leutze. He served as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1860 to 1862 but was defeated for reelection running as a Republican.221 He joined the Union League Club, but not until 1866, and the picture Leutze made for him in 1865 was initially given to another association to which he belonged, the New York Club, and probably passed to the Union League Club only after the New York Club dissolved in 1869–70.222 Most of what is known about the original circumstances of the picture comes from another article in the New York Evening Post, of May 29, 1865. The Post also noted that the work was

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f ig ur e 97 Emanuel Leutze, Abraham Lincoln Delivering His Second Inaugural Address, 1865. Oil on canvas, 69 × 50 in. Union League Club, New York.

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temporarily displayed at Goupil’s, the important French firm of fine-art engravers that maintained a gallery in New York, and defined its subject as “the late President in the act of delivering an address in front of the Capitol in Washington—the front of which building and groups of soldiers and ladies on the portico and steps form a fine background to the picture.”223 This is correct as far as it goes, but the New York Times of May 20, 1870, was more precise, giving the title as Lincoln Delivering His Second Inaugural Address.224 This famous event had taken place on March 4, 1865; less than six weeks later Lincoln was dead from an assassin’s bullet. Leutze’s picture shows signs of having been painted rather quickly, but it is not known if it was begun before or after Lincoln’s death. Leutze had benefited in several ways from Lincoln’s direct and indirect patronage, and he must have been deeply shaken by the president’s assassination. Haight undoubtedly paid for the work, but it is fair to see in it a reflection of Leutze’s own ideas and emotions. Lincoln stands in front of the Capitol, and his left hand rests on the U.S. Constitution and the Bible, alluding to the oath of office. The East Front of the Capitol is shown, with its columned porch crowned by a glimpse of Luigi Persico’s pediment sculpture from the 1820s. Of the sculptures that then stood at the sides of the top of the grand staircase, the viewer sees only the group on the right, Horatio Greenough’s Rescue, installed in 1853.225 Just below this marble ensemble is an informal group of soldiers of various ranks. The larger crowd is to the left of Lincoln, beneath a waving American flag: military men of high rank, men in top hats, women of various classes, and—in the foreground—men who may be members of Lincoln’s cabinet. The soldiers in the audience (especially those at the right) suggest it must be the second inaugural, and this is confirmed by the presence of two African Americans. A dark face, probably wearing a woman’s bonnet, is visible between Lincoln’s right arm and body,

and adjacent to a group of military men just beneath the flag is an African American man in light-colored civilian clothing (fig. 98). People of color were not conspicuous at the first inaugural, but at the second there were black troops (apparently not shown here) and other African Americans, who were now among the president’s most vociferous supporters. The African American man may well denote the most important person of color who attended the second inaugural: Frederick Douglass. In a sharp

f ig ur e 9 8 Emanuel Leutze, Abraham Lincoln Delivering His Second Inaugural Address, 1865 (fig. 97), detail of crowd.

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break with tradition, Douglass was invited to the reception afterward, and he described his meeting with Lincoln there: I could not have been more than ten feet from him when Mr. Lincoln saw me; his countenance lighted up, and he said in a voice which was heard all around: “Here comes my friend Douglass.” As I approached him he reached out his hand, gave me a cordial shake, and said: “Douglass, I saw you in the crowd to-day listening to my inaugural address. There is no man’s opinion that I value more than yours: what do you think of it?” I said: “Mr. Lincoln, I cannot stop here to talk with you, as there are thousands waiting to shake you by the hand”; but he said again: “What did you think of it?” I said: “Mr. Lincoln, it was a sacred effort,” and then I walked off. “I am glad you liked it,” he said. That was the last time I saw him to speak with him.226 It is characteristic of Leutze’s earlier works that he would have sought to include one or more African Americans in a picture concerned with the basic values of the American nation, and the juxtaposition of an African American and the Capitol would have also been significant in Leutze’s mind.

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The grand project of Leutze’s final years was an allegorical/historical composition on the theme of Emancipation that remained unfinished at his death, on July 18, 1868. Leutze had not obtained a formal commission to paint this work, which progressed no further than a midsized cartoon measuring forty-one by fifty-six inches. Though Leutze was not in perfect health, his death at age fifty-two was sudden and surprising, and there is every reason to think that his allegory of Emancipation

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would have been completed in one form or another had he lived. His widow soon needed to raise money for her support, and on March 4–5, 1869, a well-advertised auction of works in Leutze’s studio took place in New York City; an annotated edition of the auction catalogue states that the cartoon was purchased by the painter Worthington Whittredge on March 5 for $55, an impressive sum for a fragmentary compositional sketch in pencil. No further trace of it has since appeared. Whittredge, along with many other notable American artists, had also contributed works to the sale to help sustain Leutze’s family. The auction catalogue had this to say: “This is the study for the great Allegorical Painting of the ‘Emancipation,’ intended for the Capitol in Washington, and which was Mr. Leutze’s last great effort before his decease.”227 Other newspaper notices indicate that Leutze had the composition in mind for the Senate chamber or some other space in the Capitol; Raymond Stehle has suggested it was to be a mural for the stairwell of the Senate wing, corresponding to Westward on the House side.228 The only known description of the cartoon’s contents is found in the March 7, 1869, Sunday supplement of a Germanlanguage newspaper in New York, the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung: An admirably composed cartoon of a historicalallegorical painting, intended for the decoration of the Capitol, remained at his death. It recalls Kaulbach’s Reformation not only in its arrangement of a monumental structure but also in the fullness of its groups and finally in the lack of a fluid unified action, though we do not at all mean to assert that the picture lacks drama. The main episode of the image is the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln, who constitutes the central figure.—He is surrounded by his [cabinet] secretaries, whose unsightly, portrait-like heads and figures are not very conducive to the decorative

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quality of the image. Above, one sees Washington and the other founders and pillars of the fatherland, and several groups of women. To the right and left are two huge female figures, representing Freedom and Religion, the latter distinguished by the cross on which Christianity was founded. There is also a cross floating in the air, with the caption “In Hoc Signo Vinces.” Here we feel that the painter has given too much emphasis to Christianity in the essential development of the country and particularly the act of emancipation, since both the friends and enemies of that act appealed to the Bible in support of their views: the keenest champions of emancipation were not only the Puritans of New England but also those outside the so-called revealed religions, who want to make life on earth as beautiful, serene, and happy for themselves and others, even if they have no other faith. Emancipation is a fully human desire, and not only a Christian aspiration; but for a long time so many atrocities have been committed in the name of the Cross that it has lost the right it originally had to be a true symbol of the expression of pure human love.— But to return to the cartoon: while the historical figures may behave passively, on the other hand the artist’s imagination has unleashed full movement and passionate emotion and form in the lower groups of freed Negroes, which makes a pleasing contrast to the rest of the historicalallegorical section. On the right side of the cartoon a large gap remains, which, judging by the general composition, would have been filled with depictions of events from the recent past, by the time the artist had completed the work.229 The Staats-Zeitung’s critical response may be just, but the writer might have devoted less space to Leutze’s exaltation of Christianity and more to the “passionate

emotion and form” of the African American figures. We do not know whether these figures were more like the kneeling and powerlessly grateful supplicant of Thomas Ball’s 1876 sculpture of Lincoln and a freed slave (fig. 99) or like Ward’s potent and self-sufficient freedman (fig. 89).230 Nor do we know anything further about the “events from the recent past” that Leutze might have mentally envisaged but not yet articulated on the cartoon—scenes of fugitives, black soldiers, individuals such as Douglass or Stowe? Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s 1862 Reformation (formerly Neues Museum, Berlin, but

f ig ur e 9 9 Thomas Ball, Lincoln Monument, 1876. Bronze. Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. Photo: Hickey & Robertson, Houston / The Menil Foundation.

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f ig ur e 100

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Gustav Eilers after Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Reformation (1862), 1868. Engraving. Photo: author.

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destroyed in World War II; fig. 100), to which Leutze’s picture is likened, was a somewhat ungainly construction of multiple narrative moments, generally based in compositional terms on Raphael’s School of Athens. Kaulbach’s work was indeed well known to Leutze, as Kaulbach was the foremost practitioner of stereochromy, and his mural had been painted in a stairway (in a Berlin museum), like Leutze’s Westward.231 The inclusion of “several groups of women” may betoken the crucial role they played in antislavery activism; they and the cabinet secretaries recall some of the details in Leutze’s Lincoln (figs. 97–98). The presence of George Washington in Leutze’s Emancipation is also noteworthy, suggesting a reminiscence of his Crossing as well as his Washington as Surveyor. These connections with Leutze’s earlier images of African Americans cut both ways: without denying that Leutze’s views about people of color were likely to have become more forthright during and after the Civil War, his decision to design this composition—without a fixed commission—puts his earlier inclusions of African American figures in a

different light. Had Leutze managed to complete this project, it would have stood as the most complex, conspicuous, and authoritative public visual articulation of the issue of slavery and of African American identity of the mid-nineteenth century. It is of course also possible that he would never have succeeded in placing such a work in the Capitol. Finally, it must be emphasized that this unfinished work, although planned in the United States for a consummately American location, once again would have deployed many elements of the European artistic tradition, and its complex transatlantic character is further highlighted by the fact that a German-language newspaper is the essential source for what is known of it. In the end it is not possible to fully separate the American and German sources of Leutze’s surprisingly intricate depictions of people of black-African descent, and that is only fitting for an artist whose career prospered in both his native and adopted lands.232

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4 “Something American” Art and Slavery in the Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton

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n f ebruary 7, 1907 , the venerable Charles Eliot Norton—retired Harvard professor, one of the most influential American intellectuals of his day, and founder of the teaching of art history in the United States—sent a work of art from his Cambridge home (Shady Hill) to the Fogg Museum, only a few blocks away.1 Though already in poor health—he was to die only a year later, at the age of eighty—Norton had remained engaged with the life of the university and his other cultural and political pursuits throughout his retirement. In February of 1905, for example, he had gone to hear W. E. B. Du Bois speak at Harvard. The two men had probably met during Du Bois’s student years at Harvard around 1890, but now Norton, much impressed by the lecture, invited Du Bois to visit him at Shady Hill; a further bout of illness made the visit impossible, but the two men wrote to each other with mutual respect.2 It is too bad Du Bois never got a chance to visit Shady Hill and see the picture Norton sent as a gift to the Fogg in 1907. His reaction might have been illuminating, as might have been the reaction of Alain Locke, who graduated from Harvard in the spring of 1907, but it is unknown whether he had a chance to see Norton’s gift to the Fogg. Locke, one of the most eminent African American intellectuals of

the first half of the twentieth century, went on to publish the first broad-based consideration of how European artists depicted persons of color, in his Negro in Art of 1940. Norton’s gift (fig. 101) was a sizeable, nearly twofoot-high watercolor and gouache painted in Turin in 1858 by John Ruskin, a copy after one small corner of a vast canvas (eleven by eighteen feet) created by Paolo Veronese and his workshop around 1580, depicting the Queen of Sheba before King Solomon (fig. 102). The principal figure of Ruskin’s watercolor is the young black African maidservant who is a member of the queen’s entourage, in the lower right-hand corner of the Veronese picture (fig. 103).3 In an accompanying letter to the Fogg’s director, Norton correctly notes that the watercolor was the most important in the story of Ruskin’s life and that Ruskin himself had often referred to it in his writings. Indeed, on the edge of the work’s mat Norton cites the places in Ruskin’s books where it is discussed, and quotes one at length: “It wasn’t the Queen herself,—by the way,—but only one of her maids of honour, on whose gold brocaded dress, (relieved by a black’s head, who carried two red and green parrots on a salver,) I worked till I could do no more;—to my father’s extreme amazement and disgust, 165

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f ig ur e 101 John Ruskin, The Queen of Sheba’s Black Maidservant, after Paolo Veronese and workshop, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1858. Watercolor and gouache, 57 × 44.5 cm. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Gift of Professor Charles Eliot Norton, 1907.2. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

when I brought the petticoat, parrots, and blackamoor, home, as the best fruit of my summer at the Court of Sardinia.”4 In what follows, I explain why this watercolor was so important to both Ruskin and Norton and how and why it ended up in Norton’s possession and eventually in the Fogg. Through this analysis, another aspect of the nineteenth-century transatlantic verbal and visual discourse about race will become evident. Born in 1819 into a wealthy, cultivated, and intensely evangelical family, Ruskin started to publish

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very early, and in 1843 he issued the first volume of his Modern Painters, with a ringing defense of the work of J. M. W. Turner that includes a famous though now-controversial description of Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On (better known as The Slave Ship) of 1840 (fig. 104).5 Ruskin highlights the tragic and brutal mood of the picture but refers to its actual antislavery subject only in a brief footnote. On January 1, 1844, Ruskin’s proud father made a present of the picture to his son. In 1851–53 Ruskin issued his most famous work, The Stones of Venice. His subsequent shift from artistic to political analysis owed much to the ideological influence of Thomas Carlyle, and Carlyle’s coarsely racist essay of 1849, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (republished in slightly different form as a pamphlet more provocatively entitled Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question in 1853, a hostile response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin), surely pushed Ruskin toward a more reactionary position with regard to the rights and abilities of people of African descent.6 Charles Eliot Norton was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, eight years later than Ruskin, in 1827.7 Norton’s family, like Ruskin’s, prized learning, piety, and mercantile prosperity. After a tour of duty as a merchant in India, the young Norton switched to a career as a scholar and critic and began to cultivate British connections. By 1852 he had at least caught a glimpse of Ruskin, and in 1855 he visited the Ruskin family home at Denmark Hill, near London, in order to see John Ruskin’s Turners (including The Slave Ship).8 In that same year Norton enjoyed a vacation at the home of family friends in South Carolina, and although he condemned slavery (mostly as leading to the degradation of masters), he was then quite tepid about the prospects for abolishing it in the United States.9 Norton’s further travels in Europe in 1856 resulted in an accidental but much more personal encounter with

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f ig ur e 1 0 2 Paolo Veronese and workshop, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, ca. 1580. Oil on canvas, 344 × 545 cm. Galleria Sabauda, Turin, 464. Photo licensed by the Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali—Torino, Musei Reali—Galleria Sabauda.

f ig ur e 1 0 3 Paolo Veronese and workshop, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, ca. 1580 (fig. 102), detail of group with African figure.

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f ig ur e 104 J. M. W. Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On (The Slave Ship), 1840. Oil on canvas, 90.8 × 122.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 99.22. Photo © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Ruskin on a steamer on Lake Geneva, and at this point they became fast friends and recognized each other as intellectual equals; in fact, in art-historical matters the older Ruskin proclaimed the younger Norton his tutor.10 In 1857 Norton was in Rome, and it was he who provided the first account (discussed in chapter 2) of Harriet Beecher Stowe delivering a mesmerizing narrative about Sojourner Truth, at the home of 168

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William Wetmore Story.11 Stowe also corresponded with Ruskin in this period and met him while traveling in Switzerland. Ruskin, though he disliked Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was civil to her and found her adolescent daughter—with whom he argued about the novel—charming.12 In July and August of 1858 Ruskin spent six weeks in and around Turin, then the capital of the

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f ig ur e 1 0 5 John Ruskin after Jacopo Tintoretto, Adoration of the Magi, 1845. Colored pencil and ink on paper, 34 × 50 cm. Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University), RF 1552. Photo: Ruskin Foundation.

Kingdom of Sardinia (Savoy). He frequented the rich picture collections of the Royal Gallery and made several copies after small bits of the huge Veronese Solomon and Sheba, a painting then esteemed as one of the museum’s gems. Copying old-master pictures was a standard practice among artists of the period, and Ruskin was addicted to it. Thirteen years earlier Ruskin had copied a painting by Veronese’s rival Tintoretto, a 1582 Adoration of the Magi from the Venetian Scuola Grande di San Rocco with a black African Magus whom Ruskin loosely rendered (fig. 105).13 His Turin effort was far more precise. Ruskin wrote enthusiastically to his father in several sequential letters, mentioning the figure of the African woman he had decided to focus on: “I hope to get rather a nice bit of drawing, a little like my black Tintoret angels, from Veronese here, only the angel

is in this case a negress, much frightened at seeing her mistress—the Queen of Sheba—nearly fainting before Solomon.” “It is only the negro girl with her two birds, one of gold and one of enamel, with ruby eyes, for a present to Solomon, and a bit of the white and gold train of her mistress behind her; but it begins to look very well.” “I have this forenoon finished my negro girl, and she has come out so well that she will stand beside Hunt or John Lewis, provided she isn’t put in too strong a light; as if she is, she looks a little rough. I will send you her size to-morrow that you may have a frame ready for her.” “I am very glad you like the notion of the negress, for I am pretty sure you will like Solomon too, and therefore both.”14 Ruskin’s copy is by and large meticulously accurate, though he has made the rather ambiguous gender of Veronese’s figure more clearly female and rendered the

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proportions of the head slightly more “prognathous” (with the lower part of the face projecting forward) in line with the views of later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European racial theory. According to the widely accepted principles of Petrus Camper, Johann Kaspar Lavater, and Julien-Joseph Virey, a lower “facial angle” was characteristic of black Africans and pejoratively linked them to the apes in aesthetic and even (for Lavater and Virey) intellectual and moral terms. Camper had actually been motivated to develop his system by a critique of how artists represented black Africans.15 On the whole, however, both the watercolor and Ruskin’s words to his father suggest an admiration for the figure of the maidservant, and it was only much later that Ruskin described the work and its subject in a more dismissive tone. In the third chapter of his Praeterita, completed by 1889, he gave the account of his copy cited above: “It wasn’t the Queen herself,—by the way,—but only one of her maids of honour, on whose gold brocaded dress, (relieved by a black’s head, who carried two red and green parrots on a salver,) I worked till I could do no more;—to my father’s extreme amazement and disgust, when I brought the petticoat, parrots, and blackamoor, home, as the best fruit of my summer at the Court of Sardinia.”16 This particular passage was inscribed by Norton himself on the mat of the watercolor he donated to the Fogg. In the history of European images of people of color, Veronese’s paintings loom large. Veronese was not, it is true, particularly innovative in the iconographic use he made of Africans. In this respect his choices depend mostly on earlier painters of the Venetian Renaissance, such as Vittore Carpaccio, Titian, Bonifazio de’ Pitati, and even his slightly older rival, Tintoretto. For example, in the 1550s Bonifazio de’ Pitati’s workshop had produced a picture of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba with an African attendant 170

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(fig. 106).17 (It is unlikely that Veronese was aware of a handful of earlier Northern European renderings of the Queen of Sheba herself as a black African.)18 Veronese’s depictions of Africans are, however, especially elegant, whether the figures represented are members of the elite (several Magi, and a splendid figure of a wealthy and honored guest in exotic clothing [fig. 107] at the sacred banquet of the Marriage at Cana) or—as is much more often the case— as elaborately costumed servants in sacred, classical, or allegorical subjects.19 Moreover, Veronese painted substantially more black African figures than any of his European predecessors and contemporaries: about forty of the painter’s surviving pictures (and another forty produced by his workshop) include dark-skinned characters.20 Both the quality and the quantity of Veronese’s representations of Africans, then, help to explain Ruskin’s attraction to this detail of the Turin canvas. Ruskin would have been able to see many examples of Veronese’s Africans even before he set off on his extensive European travels in the 1840s: the Duke of Sutherland’s collections at Stafford House in London, for example, included two Veronese compositions with dark-skinned figures.21 Veronese’s images of Africans were also widely imitated by the prolific painters of the Venetian rococo era, such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his son Giovanni Domenico, and while these eighteenthcentury artists were out of fashion in the mid-1800s, their works helped to keep depictions of Africans in Veronese’s “manner,” as Ruskin termed it, visible.22 Nor was Ruskin the only artist to copy this kind of figure. In 1831–33 Samuel F. B. Morse, at the height of his early career as a painter, produced an ambitious view of the Louvre’s most famous gallery, the Salon Carré.23 Morse removed all recent works from his vision of the space, including Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, but he did include a little less than half of

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f ig ur e 106 Workshop of Bonifazio de’ Pitati, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1556. Oil on canvas, 182 × 444 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Archivi Alinari, Florence.

Veronese’s enormous (six hundred square feet) Marriage at Cana, albeit at an extremely foreshortened angle (fig. 108). Nevertheless, at least one of the many African characters in the picture is visible, a waiter in a red hat at the far right (fig. 109). An American travel memoir published in 1818 had already noted the picture’s “attendants, slaves, dogs, a parrot, a negro page.”24 Many decades later the Marriage’s juxtaposition of a dark-skinned page with a dwarf (fig. 107) may be reflected in a passage in Henry James’s Wings of the Dove (1902), where an American woman in Venice explicitly compares herself to a detail of a Veronese picture: “the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for effect.”25 The following year, in his biography of William Wetmore Story, James describes a luxurious bowl

of fruit as “vast as some embossed tray held up by a blackamoor in a Veronese picture.”26 Both Americans and Englishmen, then, had internalized Veronese’s Africans as a metaphor for Old World luxury. During the fall of 1858 Ruskin wrote several letters to Norton about his copies at Turin, though they do not cite the African figure. He did, however, at least elliptically reveal that his copying from Veronese had led him to a profound spiritual crisis. In Turin, he remarked, “I studied Paul Veronese in the morning and went to the opera at night for six weeks! And I’ve found out a good deal—more than I can put in a letter—in that six weeks, the main thing in the way of discovery being that, positively, to be a first-rate painter—you mustn’t be pious; but rather a little wicked, and entirely a man of the world. I had been inclining to this opinion for

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f ig ur e 107 Paolo Veronese, Marriage at Cana, 1562–63, detail of left side. Oil on canvas, 666 × 990 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, 142. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

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f ig ur e 108 Samuel F. B. Morse, The Salon Carré at the Louvre, 1831–33. Oil on canvas, 73 ¾ × 108 in. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago. Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.51. Photo: Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago / Art Resource, New York.

some years; but I clinched it at Turin.”27 In his autobiography Ruskin eventually made clear that the contrast of a graceless, narrow-minded sermon by a local Piedmontese Protestant preacher and the divine grace and beauty of Veronese’s picture had prompted him finally to abandon his evangelical Protestant beliefs, which were “that day . . . put away, to be debated of no more.”28 It is ironic that Ruskin’s beliefs were shaken by this particular picture of Veronese’s, which was

originally made for one of Europe’s most obsessively pious princes, Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy; the Venetian ambassador described him as “fervent in his beliefs and fearful before God.”29 Ruskin’s loss of traditional Christian faith, which Norton himself had experienced, in part through the same exposure to the great tradition of Italian art, was referenced in Norton’s letter accompanying his gift to the Fogg:

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f ig ur e 109 Paolo Veronese, Marriage at Cana, 1562–63, detail of right side. Oil on canvas, 666 × 990 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, 142. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

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I send to you as a gift to the Fogg Art Museum what I presume to be the drawing of Ruskin which is the most important in the story of his life. It is the copy that he made in 1858 of a portion of the great picture by Paolo Veronese of “Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,” in the gallery at Turin. He refers many times in his writings to this drawing and to the influence which the picture, combined with other circumstances, had upon him in changing the current of his thoughts and in modifying his convictions in relation to life as well as to art.30 By the early 1860s both men were increasingly engaged with political, rather than purely cultural, matters. Secession and the start of the Civil War radicalized Norton, who—though not impressed by hearing Frederick Douglass in 1862—soon realized that only emancipation could justify the war’s human cost.31 In a letter to his close friend George Curtis, written on September 23, 1862, the day after the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, Norton expressed himself in unusually emotional terms: “My Dearest George:—God be praised! I can hardly see to write,—for when I think of this great act of Freedom, and all it implies, my heart and my eyes overflow with the deepest, most serious gladness. I rejoice with you. Let us rejoice together, and with all the lovers of liberty, and with all the enslaved and oppressed everywhere. . . . The war is paid for.”32 But Ruskin, like Carlyle and many other Tory intellectuals in Britain, disparaged Lincoln and the Union and regarded antislavery as a misguided or even cynical pretext for Northern aggression. On February 10, 1863, probably in response to a missive from Norton celebrating the implementation of emancipation on January 1, Ruskin responded with the following words:

The miserablest idiocy of the whole has been your mixing up a fight for dominion (the most insolent and tyrannical, and the worst conducted, in all history) with a soi disant fight for liberty. If you want the slaves to be free, let their masters go free first, in God’s name. If they don’t like to be governed by you, let them govern themselves. Then, treating them as a stranger state, if you like to say, “You shall let that black fellow go, or”—etc., as a brave boy would fight another for a fag at Eton—do so; but you know perfectly well no fight could be got up on those terms; and that this fight is partly for money, partly for vanity, partly (as those wretched Irish whom you have inveigled into it show) for wild anarchy and the Devil’s cause and crown, everywhere. As for your precious proclamation . . . if I had it here—there’s a fine north wind blowing, and I would give it to the first boy I met to fly it at his kite’s tail. Not but that it may do mischief enough, as idle words have done and will do, to the end of time.33 At the end, Ruskin added an even more provocative postscript: “As soon as I’ve got a house, I’ll ask you to send me something American—a slave, perhaps. I’ve a great notion of a black boy in a green jacket and purple cap—in Paul Veronese’s manner.” Though a number of Veronese’s Africans wear green, the particular combination of green and purple is rarer and must have been prompted by Ruskin’s memory of the Veronese in Turin, where the woman is adorned with green and pale-purple garments. William Dean Howells, in his 1866 Venetian Life, speaks of the painted wooden African Magus on the Torre dell’Orologio in Venice (see fig. 6) as “gorgeous in green and gold.”34 This conflation of enslaved African Americans with the many dark-skinned servants in at least forty of Veronese’s paintings is rich in its implications. In

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one respect it is Ruskin acting on his 1858 realization before the Turin painting that great art “is a little wicked.” In the earlier part of the letter Ruskin, by comparing the Union armies to Saint Dominic’s and Simon de Montfort’s persecution of Albigensian heretics, seems to suggest that Norton’s embrace of abolition is rather like the naïve and narrow evangelical belief and morality that Veronese had taught Ruskin to abandon. (Those heretics were the spiritual ancestors of the Piedmontese Protestants, whose hidebound faith had alienated Ruskin from the religion of his youth.) For all of Ruskin’s explicit defense (in other texts) of the idea that blacks were inherently inferior and required the mastery of whites in one form or another, in this postscript he seems highly aware of being transgressive and offensive, as indeed Carlyle had been in his tracts of 1849 and 1853. In the same letter Ruskin alerts Norton to a forthcoming disquisition (“some nice little bits”) on slavery, which appeared within his “Essays on Political Economy” in the April 1863 issue of Fraser’s Magazine.35 In this essay Ruskin dismisses principled opposition to slavery, in more or less Aristotelian terms—some humans are natural slaves—and is especially flip about the enslavement of Africans. The provocative tone reappears in a text of 1871, in an issue of Ruskin’s “blog” (what else to call an irregular series of published letters “to workingmen” in which Ruskin free-associated about various issues of the day?). Responding to a worker’s criticism about Ruskin’s having spent a thousand pounds on a picture, Ruskin asked rhetorically what else he should buy with his money: “I can’t well burn more coals than I do, because of the blacks [coal soot], which spoil my books; and the Americans won’t let me buy any blacks alive, or else I would have some black dwarfs with parrots, such as one sees in the pictures of Paul Veronese. I should of course like, myself, above all things, to buy a pretty white girl, with a title—and I should get great praise for doing 176

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that—only I haven’t money enough. White girls come dear, even when one buys them only like coals, for fuel.”36 This last comment—as strange as the rest of the section—then led him off into a consideration of the burning of Joan of Arc. What is visible here is an association in Ruskin’s mind between people and pictures as forms of property, and his urge to defend the ownership of both kinds of property against the charge of being morally reprehensible. A similar construct is expressed in the 1863 letter to Norton, where the line between a slave and a painting of a slave is blurred, and one might be tempted to trace the origins of Ruskin’s anxiety about this charge back to his early ownership of The Slave Ship. What did it mean to own the most famous picture about the obscenity of owning people? A concern with this paradox may have eaten at Ruskin, and one way of interpreting his loss of faith while working on the Veronese watercolor is that he felt himself to be embracing simultaneously the visceral, sensuous materiality of Veronese’s imagery and the possession of what it represented. Turner’s picture had problematized that possession of human beings, but Veronese’s does not, and Ruskin’s focus on the African woman along with a group of glittery objects—“petticoat, parrots, and blackamoor,” as Ruskin later put it—highlights his interest in the material splendors of the Renaissance painting rather than its human drama. It is notable that while in Veronese’s picture the two parrots appear to be living creatures, however gaudy, Ruskin in his copy subtly converts them into bejeweled objets-d’art—“one of gold and one of enamel, with ruby eyes,” as he put it in one of his 1858 letters. In another of the 1858 letters, to his father, Ruskin writes possessively of “my negro girl,” which may be a significant formulation.37 In any case, despite his early enthusiasm for Turner’s Slave Ship, in 1868 Ruskin decided to sell it, and when no buyer emerged in England, he sent it to New York, where it was purchased by the plutocrat John Taylor Johnston in

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1872. Ironically, in light of his mocking request for an American slave from Norton, it was Ruskin who ended up sending “slaves” to America. In 1876 it was sold to a politically progressive Bostonian and was often on display in the Museum of Fine Arts until that institution finally acquired it outright in 1899.38 Ruskin’s deployment of an African servant in Renaissance art to express his disdain for abolition is echoed in a painting from Liverpool, also most likely dating to 1863, which is similarly transatlantic in its context. Liverpool, once a slave port and by this time the major maritime outlet for the huge textile industry

f ig ur e 110

of the English Midlands, which depended on the American South’s cotton, was the residence of the Confederate financier and agent Charles Kuhn Prioleau from 1862. Prioleau owned a luxurious townhouse at 19 Abercromby Square and during the war hired painters (at least two Americans and one Englishman) to decorate it. A painted ceiling in this building (now part of the University of Liverpool) represents an elegant Greco-Roman banquet, with white diners attended by an African waiter (fig. 110). Other elements of the house’s painted decoration are politically coded, and the black waiter is an attempt to draw a positive parallel

Ancient Feast, ca. 1863, detail. Mural at 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool. Photo: author.

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between ancient slave societies and the Confederacy: the idea is that a gracious lifestyle and cultural sophistication require enslaved labor.39 Though Ruskin and Norton’s disagreements about slavery and the Civil War for a time interrupted their friendship and correspondence, they patched things up once the war ended. In 1872 Ruskin wrote to Norton that he was happy the Slave Ship (fig. 104) was in the United States—though, characteristically, he remarked to his American buyer, Johnston, that the painting was not a critique of slavery per se but only of the slave trade.40 If for Ruskin the ethics of Turner’s Slave Ship were now seriously at odds with his own notions of political morality, Norton—now teaching texts and images at Harvard—instead increasingly grounded his considerable hopes for American democracy in the pedagogical idea that the literary and visual arts would “enlarge a person’s comprehension of reality [and] strengthen sympathies with other human beings,” as one modern critic has put it.41 Nevertheless, in Ruskin’s difficult later years the two men became especially close, and Ruskin appointed Norton his literary executor. But Ruskin did not cease to belabor Norton for his views about people of color. In a part of Praeterita (Ruskin’s autobiography), written in the late 1880s, he included this curious passage at the end of a somewhat romanticized version of his early encounter with Norton on Lake Geneva in 1856: Since that day at Sallenches it has become a matter of the most curious speculation to me, what sort of soul Charles Norton would have become, if he had had the blessing to be born an English Tory, or a Scotch Jacobite, or a French Gentilhomme, or a Savoyard Count. I think I should have liked him best to have been a Savoyard Count; say, Lord of the very Tower of Sallenches, a quarter of a mile 178

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above me at the opening of the glen,—habitable yet and inhabited; it is half hidden by its climbing grapes. Then, to have read the “Fioretti di San Francesco,” (which he found out, New Englander though he was, before I did), in earliest boyhood; then to have been brought into instructively grievous collision with Commerce, Liberty, and Evangelicalism at Geneva; then to have learned Political Economy from Carlyle and me; and finally devoted himself to write the History of the Bishops of Sion! What a grand, happy, consistent creature he would have been,—while now he is hopelessly out of gear and place, over in the States there, as a runaway star dropped into Purgatory; and twenty times more a slave than the blackest nigger he ever set his white scholars to fight the South for; because all the faculties a black has may be fully developed by a good master (see Miss Edgeworth’s story of the grateful Negro),—while only about the thirtieth or fortieth part of Charles Norton’s effective contents and capacity are beneficially spent in the dilution of the hot lava, and fructification of the hot ashes, of American character.42 Norton must have been mightily provoked by these words, and though he never (as far as we know) directly responded to them, he did point out that Ruskin’s account of the meeting on Lake Geneva was wildly inaccurate.43 One can imagine Norton turning over in his grave, however, on discovering that his daughter’s edition of his letters, published posthumously in 1913, included this objectionable passage in a concluding appendix.44 And yet, I would claim, Norton did manage to have the most potent last word in his dispute with Ruskin over slavery and the abilities of people of color. Norton’s increasingly progressive views are demonstrated not only by his contact with Du Bois but also by a somewhat earlier correspondence with Booker T.

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Washington, who in 1898 came with his wife to visit Norton at his summer home in Ashfield, Massachusetts, and to speak in the famous summer lecture series Norton sponsored there.45 Two years later, in 1900, Ruskin passed away after many years of mental illness, and Norton set out on his last, melancholy trip to England, in order to fulfill his duties as executor. Ruskin’s biographers hate Norton because as executor he prevented the publication of his friend’s unfinished works; Norton had long felt that Ruskin’s reputation had been poorly served by overpublication and overexposure.46 Norton also appears to have destroyed many letters, including some of his own to Ruskin, which may well explain why none of his epistolary responses to Ruskin’s racism is known today.47 But Norton did quite deliberately choose to take home with him Ruskin’s copy of the black African girl in the Veronese, which he then donated to the Fogg in 1907. And here one imagines the ever-serious Norton smiling just a bit, as he thought back to his cruel friend’s mocking request in 1863 for “something American—a slave perhaps . . . , in Paul Veronese’s manner,” for his new house, because in the end this was just what Norton took from Ruskin and installed in his own grand dwelling at Shady Hill,

where it assumed, no doubt, a very different meaning than it had once had in Ruskin’s possession. For Ruskin it surely signified that only white masters and mistresses (the artist Veronese, his fair-skinned Queen of Sheba, Ruskin himself ) could make blackness admirable, through their possession and/or dominance of people of African descent. At Shady Hill, the work complemented Norton’s firm belief that the Italian and more broadly the European cultural tradition established a moral system that could serve as a guide for American democracy and the empowerment of the oppressed. Norton may not have been correct in this belief, but in the context of his own era, he remains an impressive figure. It is striking that the first real art historian in an American university should have selected this work for himself and later ensured that it would be visible to a broad American audience, just as Turner’s Slave Ship was accessible in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts a few miles away on the other side of the Charles River. The next chapter shows that Norton not only was conscious of the black presence in the tradition of European culture but also recommended that tradition as a means of uplift for African Americans themselves.

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5

Old Masters The Western Tradition of the Visual Arts in African American Culture in the Civil War Era

B

y t he mi d- ni ne t een t h century, many American painters and sculptors were conflicted about their relationship to European culture. While all admitted that their art had its source in European traditions, the weight of that tradition (and the frequent condescension of European critics) often led to a kind of resentment even among those fortunate enough to study in Italy, France, or Germany. The sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, for example, after spending four years in Italy in the 1840s, feared he was losing his American character abroad and sought to bring about what he called his “freedom from old masters” by returning to the United States.1 Others declined to seek direct exposure to European culture, making a virtue of what in some cases was a financial inability to make such a costly and time-consuming trip to the Old World. And the elite audiences for and critics of American art themselves vacillated between condemning and praising a transatlantic cosmopolitanism in individual artists. Even as binational an artist as Leutze felt constrained to declare an emphatically American identity. Artists who occupied more liminal positions within the established hierarchies of American society, however, seem to have been less fearful of losing themselves in European study and practice. Women artists, Catholic

artists, and—most significantly for my purposes—African American artists were less likely to express these fears. Neither Eugène Warburg nor Edmonia Lewis, for example, gave voice to these concerns, though their work abroad continued to be directed toward American patrons. For these two artists the “old masters” of the European tradition stood as beacons even as the “old masters” of American slaveholding and their political supporters and instruments were among the factors that encouraged their emigration. Several of the better-known white American intellectuals who belonged to the antislavery movement also encouraged African American engagement with the traditions of European visual and literary culture. Harriet Beecher Stowe helped Warburg travel to Italy in 1856, as Lydia Maria Child was to do with Edmonia Lewis some years later.2 Charles Eliot Norton did not assist any African American artist with European study, but his affiliation with a pioneering integrated school in Indiana during the Civil War did produce an intriguing letter with advice about the importance of Latin and Italian literature. Norton was listed as a contributor in the table of contents of the Students’ Repository, a periodical issued by the mostly African American Union Literary Institute 181

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in Randolph County, Indiana, for most of its short run, in 1863–64.3 Norton appears also to have been a benefactor of the institute, formed with Quaker support in 1845, though it is not known by what means he became connected with it. Part of a speech and two letters by him were published in the Students’ Repository in 1864.4 His letter on “classical studies” was evidently a response to the editor’s question whether the school’s students should learn Latin or Italian. Norton gave priority to Latin, recommending the ancient culture to which it gave access as a sharp but instructive contrast with current American life: “To read Virgil or Horace is for an American as good as to enter a foreign society, from which he may learn alike the advantages and the defects of our own civilization.” He further suggested that a mastery of Dante’s Divine Comedy in its original Italian was also deeply desirable. It is not surprising that Norton, whose classical education had led him into a particularly detailed study of earlier Italian literary and visual culture, would make these recommendations, but it is notable that the editor of this journal, in a remote part of the Midwest, deemed it useful for his largely African American readers.

f r e de r ic k d o ug l as s

The idea that the classical and Renaissance cultural traditions ought to have an appeal and use for African Americans had already been brought forward, however, by African American writers. On May 5, 1848, Frederick Douglass’s North Star published an essay entitled “Prejudice Against Color,” probably written by Douglass himself. The essay, rather neglected by modern scholars, is an all-out attack on the claim that a visceral hostility to dark skin is universal, and a consideration of the ancient culture venerated by European and American elites is at the heart of the argument.

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How this American colorphobia would have lashed itself into a foam at the sight of the celebrated black goddess Diana, of Ephesus! How it would have gnashed upon the old statue, and hacked away at it out of sheer spite at its color! What exemplary havoc it would have made of the most celebrated statues of antiquity! Forsooth they were black! Their color would have been their doom. These half-white Americans owe the genius of sculpture a great grudge. She has so often crossed their path in the hated color, it would fare hard with her if she were to fall into their clutches. By the way, it would be well for Marshall [William Calder Marshall, a prolific Scottish sculptor] and other European sculptors to keep a keen look-out upon all Americans visiting their collections. American colorphobia would be untrue to itself if it did not pitch battle with every black statue and bust that came in its way in going the rounds. A black Apollo, whatever the symmetry of his proportions, the majesty of his attitude, or the divinity of his air, would meet with great good fortune if it escaped mutilation at its hands, or at least defilement from its spittle. If all foreign artists, whose collections are visited by Americans, would fence off a corner of their galleries for a “negro pew,” and straightway colonize in thither every specimen of ancient and modern art that is chiseled or cast in black, it would be a wise precaution.5 The writer then cites Homer and Herodotus on the virtues of the black Ethiopians of antiquity and discusses the New Testament’s admiration for the pious Ethiopian eunuch converted by the apostle Philip. The so-called law of nature that mandated a revulsion against dark skin was, the writer contends, something that developed in Western culture long after the modern African slave trade commenced. Prejudice against

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color “never existed in Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian States, Prussia, Austria, Russia, or in any part of the world where colored persons have not been held as slaves.” Even in some places where black slavery existed, such as Turkey, Brazil, and Persia, no color prejudice necessarily accompanied it. This attempt to recuperate virtually all of European and Mediterranean culture from the charge of innate hostility to blackness is remarkable, but it requires some clarifications. Few modern scholars would agree with the exoneration of the European nations—especially Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal—but Douglass, who had already been to the British Isles, certainly had reason to contrast the vituperative and ubiquitous nature of American antiblack racism with European norms in this era. While his references to ancient and early Christian texts mostly point to actual praise of dark-skinned Africans, the works of sculpture to which he refers are more heterogeneous. Douglass begins with the figure of Diana (Artemis) of Ephesus in Asia Minor, an originally Hellenic goddess whose cult emphasized fertility, and indeed some ancient (e.g., fig. 111) and Renaissance images show her as having a dark complexion.6 This is his boldest evidence in opposition to the racist claims of American writers. The other sculptural examples from antiquity apparently refer to darkly patinated works in bronze, and lest it be thought that Douglass exaggerates American sensibilities, it is important to note that bronze equestrian portraits of both Jefferson and Washington were disparaged around this time for their “blackamoor appearance.”7 The comment about the work of William Calder Marshall (1813–1894), who does not seem to have represented any persons of African descent, must also refer to works in bronze.8 Finally, Douglass’s astonishing, if tongue-in-cheek, idea that foreign sculptors hoping for American visitors might need to create a color line with the objects in their studios deserves attention. As

he so often does, Douglass exploits the bizarre consequences of extreme racial prejudice to expose the illogic and hypocrisy of the system as a whole, and it should be recalled that a few months earlier, on December 3, 1847, he had chosen to reprint in the initial issue of his new weekly paper the first verbal parody of Powers’s Greek Slave (as the black “American Slave”) from Punch.9 For Douglass, raising the conceptual paradoxes in sculpture’s replication of the black body had significant appeal. While it is true that his primary aim in “Prejudice Against Color” is not to promote ancient or modern European sculpture as models for emulation by African American artists, the implications of the piece point in that direction.

w i l l i a m j. w i l s on

In June 1851 Douglass changed the title of his newspaper (now merged with another abolitionist publication) to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, which, like its predecessor, continued to be based in Rochester, New York. One of the more distinctive contributors to Douglass’s weekly throughout the 1850s was its New York City correspondent, who signed himself “Ethiop.” “Ethiop” was the nom de plume of William J. Wilson (b. 1818), an educator who served as principal of the African School in Brooklyn, later known as Colored School No. 1.10 Wilson’s columns are brilliant, unconventional, and provocative, and like Douglass he had a penchant for writing about the visual arts. He is best known today for an 1859 journalistic tour de force entitled “The Afric-American Picture Gallery,” but that essay uses the visual arts merely as a rhetorical device for describing various modes of contemporary and historical African American life.11 It does not discuss any actual works of art, and its textual vignettes are far more literary than visual in nature. Much more interesting for my purposes is an earlier column of March 11, 1853, in which

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Wilson launches an explicit call for African Americans to enter the ranks of ambitious adherents of the Western visual tradition.12 Wilson, as “Ethiop,” recounts that he had spent March 4 strolling down Broadway. He first speaks of looking in at Plumb’s daguerreotype studio (staffed by a diffident young African American employee), but then turns to a shop below street grade, where his eye is caught by a “pallid, pensive” sculpture of George Washington that “stood in solemn-majesty.” “I entered, and became so deeply absorbed in the wonders around me, that it was some moments before I became aware of the presence of an extraordinary image, bolt upright before me—one of the old masters, truly, said I, as I looked up. It was the proprietor, an Italian, whose head would have given the painter or sculptor more delight than any one of the fine models of his own studio.” In this shop Wilson notes portraits of the founding fathers, Olympian deities, and the rulers of Britain and France, but finds “not the Emperor of Hayti, nor of Dohomey, nor the President of Liberia, nor any other distinguished black.”

f ig ur e 111 Diana of Ephesus, second century c.e. Marble. Museo nazionale, Naples. Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.5.

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I inquired for one or two—Touissant L’Overteure, Boyer and Faustin I. The reply of the old Italian, after a shrug of his shoulders, was “they no sell in this country.” I asked for some who had distinguished themselves in the country. “They no sell,” was the same reply. “Washington he sell; Franklin he sell, and,” pointing to some others, “they sell,” said he. “I have there,” said he, pointing to a box, “busts of great colored men of West Indies, for go there; sell well there; no sell here.” No demand has been made, thought I, as I rushed out of his place into the street. Wilson concludes with a demand for “radical change in the process of our development.” “At present,” he asserts, “what we find around us, either in art or

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literature, is made so to press upon us, that we depreciate, we despise, we almost hate ourselves, and all that favors us.” Even African American girls, Wilson tells us, have come to be alarmed by dark-skinned dolls, and this must change: No, no; we must begin to tell our own story, write our own lecture, paint our own picture, chisel our own bust, (I demand not caricatures but correct emanations,) acknowledge and love our own peculiarities if we have any. Ever so little done in these directions is worth more than all we have ever done, assimilative of the whites since creation, or can do till the end of time. The encouragement and self-reliance it will inspire will do more to push forward than all the speculations about our “manifest destiny,” &c., that has emanated from the brains of all the fools, white or black, in Christendom. Now is the time to begin to cultivate among us both a taste for the arts and sciences themselves, before we become more deeply immersed in the rougher affairs of life. Our present peculiar situation well calculates us for their highest perfection.13 What Wilson is proposing here is not to abandon the qualitative or stylistic ideals of white culture but to match and exceed them by selecting subjects tied to African American identity, and he notably treats the visual arts as no less crucial than literature as the means to this end. A week later Wilson returns to the theme, in a letter dated March 12 and published again in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, on March 25.14 “In my last I said something about our culture of the fine arts, music, &c. On reflection, I am still more convinced, not only of its propriety, but its utter necessity to our ultimate successful elevation. The ideas suggested by the old Italian’s replies are worth some consideration.” The very limitations of

the social position of African Americans, excluded from influential roles in politics and commerce, ought to improve their powers of observation, and this “ought to resolve [African American] youth of taste and genius, to become the true masters of the arts in this republic.” Only “the best models, especially of ourselves,” should be set before people of color for their contemplation, and an album of portraits of the Haitian emperor and his court is mentioned as an excellent point of departure. Wilson cites a passage in the recently published Health Trip to the Tropics, by the white journalist and travel writer Nathaniel Parker Willis, in which Willis avers that he would pay $5,000 for a picture that could capture the striking beauty of an old, white-bearded black man he had observed on St. Thomas in the Caribbean. Here Wilson ventures onto unstable ideological ground, as Willis’s “admiring” comments about black beauty aestheticize, eroticize, and objectify African bodies in a fetishistic way that emphasizes these handsome bodies as slave-like human property. Wilson’s summary of Willis’s text implies that Willis wanted this picture for himself, but in fact the white writer puts it rather differently: “If he could have been framed, and hung up, in a drawing-room, I would have given $5000 for him, to re-sell to someone who could afford to own him as a picture.”15 But Wilson himself is of course not advocating depictions of black beauty for their own sake; he insists that his goal in promoting artists and subjects of color is directed at “enabling us thereby to exhibit, and see ourselves exhibited as we are, which is always one of the best means for the improvement and progress of a people.” Wilson concludes with a challenge: “Let a room for readings, or drawings, paintings, or sculpturings, or music, rare collections or inventions, or all of these, be opened in the heart of Gotham. . . . Come, gentlemen, who will lead?”16 Such a cultural center did not appear in New York City in the 1850s, but the careers of Eugène Warburg

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(who had just reached Paris as Wilson was writing) and Robert Duncanson did unfold during that decade. Two years later another writer for Frederick Douglass’ Paper, James McCune Smith, lamented “poor black humanity, too poor to have marbled halls and picture galleries of its own,” and affirmed that those who wanted to master the arts must “go and eat Italian dirt.”17 In 1859 Wilson had to resort to creating his own (verbal) gallery of scenes from black life, in the aforementioned “Afric-American Picture Gallery” series. But if there was not yet the wherewithal to create a thriving sophisticated cohort of American fine artists of color, African Americans did apparently begin to form private arrays of images including black subjects. One of the earliest references to this kind of collection appears in Frank Webb’s novel The Garies and Their Friends, of 1857.18 The wealthiest figure in the novel, the black Philadelphian Walters, owns a range of luxury artworks—paintings, vases, and bronzes “by well-known native and foreign artists.”19 The most notable object in the collection is a refined portrait of Toussaint L’Ouverture, much admired by the white Mr. Garie and described by Mr. Walters as far beyond the caricature-like images of the Haitian liberator that are normally displayed. Walters also displays a portrait of his wife and child in his collection. It can hardly be doubted that prosperous free African Americans did hang portraits of themselves and some of their black heroes in their dwellings, though the collection delineated by Webb was of course fictional. One might expect that as the crisis over slavery and secession approached a critical point, these proposals for (and fictional models of ) African American engagement with the high-art tradition would fade in the face of sterner realities. Indeed, in August of 1860 a frustrated and pessimistic Frederick Douglass dismissed the abolitionist movement as little more than a “grand operatic spectacle” performed for passive white 186

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American spectators. “Art, literature and poetry have all expended their treasures to arouse the calloused heart of the American people to the duty of letting the oppressed go free, and yet four millions struggle out their lives in blood-rusted chains,” Douglass wrote.20 But what Douglass feared at this point was not war but a continued stalemate that would leave slavery intact. Instead—as Leutze’s Westward demonstrates—the outbreak of the war itself and above all the Emancipation Proclamation made it possible in the North to represent African Americans in novel ways. Douglass and William J. Wilson, it is true, did not in their writings return to their earlier ideas about the elevating effect of the fine arts, but other African American intellectuals picked up this thread in a decided way in the summer and fall of 1862. One slightly veiled instance of this can be found in the elaborate posthumous appreciation of Eugène Warburg published in the New Orleans francophone newspaper L’Union in early December of 1862.21 Warburg had been dead for nearly four years when this encomium appeared, but with the certainty of formal emancipation only weeks away, its author clearly felt that a new generation of African Americans, with many more opportunities before them, needed to be encouraged to pursue the demanding path Warburg had chosen in a more constrained era. Though the writer never explicitly identifies either Warburg or his intended audience of readers in racial terms, the message would have been unmistakable to the black and mixed-race readership of the paper.

t hom as mor r i s c h e st e r

At exactly the same moment, in a very different part of the country, and in English rather than French, Thomas Morris Chester delivered a vivid lecture (subsequently issued as a pamphlet) to the Colored Library Company of Philadelphia on the subject of “Negro

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self-respect and pride of race.”22 Chester (1834–1892) is best known today as the first regular African American war correspondent (beginning in 1863), but he was a man of many accomplishments. In the 1850s he was a proponent of the colonization movement and worked as superintendent of schools in Liberia for a time; in the 1870s he was in England, where he was admitted to the bar; and in the last part of his career he was a Republican politician and officeholder in Louisiana.23 In December of 1862, however, his focus was on the visual arts, which he treated in an almost martial tone as vital to the goal of self-respect: “Remove as far as practicable, from all observation and association, every influence which tends to weaken your self-respect. Take down from your walls the pictures of washington, jackson, and mclellan; and if you love to gaze upon military chieftains, let the gilded frames be graced with the immortal toussaint, the brave geffrard, and the chivalrous benson, three untarnished black generals whose martial achievements are the property of history.” He makes similar recommendations for portraits of statesmen (Douglass), divines (Bishop Allen), professors, doctors, lawyers, musicians, orators, and indeed achievers in all walks of life, and he advocates for narrative images connected to his people’s history: “Tear down the large paintings in which only white faces are represented, and beautify your walls with scenes and landscapes connected with our history, which shall win our praise and inspire our admiration.” Unlike Wilson, he does not make an explicit call for these images to be made by African Americans, but within his list of heroes are several artists of color. Chester rejects white subjects as inappropriate for display in black households, but he does not critique the style of “white” art. Indeed, in a passage on how religious imagery must also be flipped in terms of complexion, he praises the Italians for having “very properly represented his satanic majesty as white”: “Now when you want a scene from

the Bible, and this cloven-footed personage is painted black, say to the vender, that your conscientious scruples will not permit you to support so gross a misrepresentation, and when the Creator and his angels are represented as white, tell him that you would be guilty of sacrilege, in encouraging the circulation of a libel upon the legions of Heaven.”24

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While Chester was principally concerned with transforming the visual displays inside African American homes, some black abolitionists were beginning to take an interest in public monuments to their heroes. William Cooper Nell’s 1851 petition to the Massachusetts legislature for a memorial to Crispus Attucks had not made any headway, but soon after Chester’s exhortative lecture, another major African American leader made a strikingly radical proposal.25 The Reverend Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882) had fled slavery in Maryland as a child and became a Presbyterian pastor. Already in 1843 he had proposed an armed rebellion of the enslaved, to considerable controversy even among abolitionists.26 Chester’s lecture included Garnet in the list of leaders worthy of visual commemoration, and in September of 1864 both Garnet and Frederick Douglass were described as “living monuments of the negro’s capacities.”27 But Garnet, of course, was hardly seeking his own memorialization. Instead, in remarks delivered on February 4, 1863, during a festival celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation in the African American enclave of Weeksville (now in Brooklyn), Garnet stressed the need to remember those who had paved the way for the armed struggle then in progress. Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey were the forerunners of John Brown, he averred, and he hoped “yet to see erected to the memory of these men a monument in Greenwood Cemetery, the apex of which should be crowned with

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a wreath of laurel.”28 Green-Wood, not far away in Brooklyn, had become the primary site for American monumental sculpture in the 1840s and early 1850s, through the construction of imposing memorials like Henry Kirke Brown’s tomb of DeWitt Clinton, with its image in bronze of an African American laborer (see fig. 75). For Garnet to propose a grand memorial to the most famous leaders of slave insurrections in such a prime location was a daring move. He was still thinking about a milder variant of this kind of memorializing project during the high point of his public career, the first address made by an African American to Congress, on February 12, 1865, a sermon entitled “Let the Monster Perish.” William J. Wilson, who was in the audience, noticed that Garnet stood between portraits of Washington and Lafayette, in the House chamber. Garnet looked forward to the day when “the brush, and pencil, and chisel, and Lyre of Art, shall refuse to lend their aid to scoff at the afflictions of the poor, or to caricature, or ridicule a long-suffering people,” and, speaking of emancipation, he affirmed that “genius and art may perpetuate the glorious act on canvas and in marble, but certain and more lasting monuments in commemoration of [Congress’s] decision are already erected in the hearts and memories of a grateful people.”29

edwar d m . t hom as

Garnet, however, did not propose a particular artist for the Green-Wood memorial, and neither T. Morris Chester nor William J. Wilson, despite the vociferous rhetoric of their appeals for an African American art, shows a particularly deep familiarity with current visual imagery or the art of the past in the passages quoted above. In this respect, Edward M. Thomas is quite different. Thomas, born in Philadelphia in 1821, made a successful career for himself in Washington,

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culminating in his position as the official messenger of the House of Representatives. He was one of the most “respectable” black men in the capital city and belonged to an elite group known as the Social, Civil, and Statistical Association (SCSA). He was also an active Freemason. By 1850 he was an officer of the board of the Union Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of Washington’s most influential black congregations. He traveled in Europe (though it is uncertain when) and had carefully observed famous works of art during his visits to Florence and Rome. In 1859 he became the first president of his church’s newly founded Bethel Literary and Historical Society.30 Among the sources I have located, the earliest published reference to Thomas’s engagement with the fine arts appears in the New York Weekly Anglo-African of November 24, 1860: a letter from Washington dated November 17, from a correspondent who identifies himself only as Box.31 Lincoln had been elected just two weeks earlier, and a newly optimistic mood was clearly spreading within the city’s African American community. The writer notes with some satisfaction that the “election of Abe Lincoln has caused a great deal of uneasiness among our white population.” He then quickly turns to Thomas. I dropped in the other day to see my friend Edward M. Thomas, and was ushered into his private library, which contains between five and six hundred volumes of choice standard works of ancient and modern authors, from three hundred years back up to the present day. While looking over this valuable and rare collection, my attention was attracted to three very excellent oil paintings which had been recently finished by the artist for Mr. Thomas. The first was Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice—a most excellent and masterly piece of work, and second to none that I have had the

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good fortune to look upon. The second piece was a portrait of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and is the best portrait that my eyes ever beheld. The lifelike expression and perfectly easy and natural attitude are indeed wonderful. These excellent pictures were painted by Mr. John G. Chaplin, of Huntingdon, Pa., expressly for Mr. Thomas. Mr. Chaplin is a colored man of great artistic ability, and is acknowledged to be one of the best portrait painters in America. His great skill as an artist has been clearly set forth in the two pictures referred to, and should send a thrill of pride through the heart of every lover of the arts and sciences among our down-trodden people. The third picture is a very fine life-size portrait of Mr. Thomas, and was painted by a noted colored artist of Boston, whose name has now slipped my memory [probably William Simpson]. It is indeed a most wonderful likeness, and what makes it more wonderful is the fact that it was painted from an ambrotype. I also noticed a very fine water-color, by Mr. Wm. H. Dorsey, of Philadelphia, representing an ancient tower in ruins. Mr. Dorsey is a young and talented artist, and bids fair to rank among the first in his profession in this country. I understand that he has an order for two more pictures from Mr. Thomas. So, you see, Mr. Thomas is very liberal in his encouragement of artists of his own race. The writer goes on to praise Thomas’s collection of nearly a thousand coins, going back to earliest antiquity, and nearly three thousand autographs, including examples by Washington and Lafayette as well as Toussaint and the African American polymath Benjamin Banneker. “Who,” Box asks, “would imagine that in Washington such a collection would be found to be the private property of a colored man? Many valuable collections may be found among our people, which are acquired

not merely for show, but for actual study and service.” This passage is something of a foundational document for African American collecting. Obviously, Thomas did not amass a collection of this kind quickly, and Box’s comments imply that free people of color had been active collectors for some time. Thomas’s origins in Philadelphia are important here, as that city (along with New Orleans) contained the most active group of African American artists in the country during the middle and later decades of the century. It is probably not a coincidence that Frank Webb’s 1857 Garies, written by a native Philadelphian and set largely in that city, describes the collection of the respectable Mr. Walters as containing both an image of Toussaint and a portrait of Walters’s wife and child, just as Thomas’s collection included both Toussaint and a portrait of himself. The painter of that portrait was from Boston, though no name is given, but the other two contemporary African American artists are both Pennsylvanians. John G. Chaplin (1828–1907) came from Huntingdon, near Altoona, but clearly had patrons in Philadelphia, while William Dorsey was another native of the city. Dorsey had a rather limited career as a watercolor painter, but he caught the collecting bug (perhaps from Thomas) to an even greater degree. Chaplin, however, was active over a long career, and while his more ambitious subjects seem to date to the years around 1860, he is said to have exhibited work at the Chicago and St. Louis World’s Fairs of 1893 and 1904.32 His attributed surviving works vary from the cartoonish to the fairly sophisticated, but his early pictures were applauded not only by Box and Thomas but probably also by Morris Chester.33 His early subjects are fascinating in their range and notably include a whole group clearly targeted to African American buyers. In addition to the portrait of Toussaint, he made a likeness of the Haitian Fabre Geffrard (president of his nation between 1859 and 1867) and works entitled The Nubian, Emancipation,

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and The Death of Hannibal—this last, of course, an African tragic hero, though he was not usually shown with dark skin, by white artists at least.34 These works with African or African American themes were clearly for patrons of color; The Death of Hannibal was owned by William Dorsey’s mother.35 For Thomas’s friend Solomon Brown, the first African American employee of the Smithsonian Institution, Chaplin made an Adoration of the Magi, as Thomas himself reported in a March 29, 1862, letter to the Weekly Anglo-African.36 Although Thomas does not specifically cite an African Wise Man in this painting, the work surely had one. This picture was completed during the months when Leutze’s Westward (see fig. 79), with its own Magi in its border (see fig. 86), was being executed. Chaplin was also attracted to literary themes for his subjects. He is recorded as painting scenes from King Lear and Macbeth and Goethe’s Faust, and Box’s column is especially enthusiastic about his image of the medieval story of Doge Marino Faliero of Venice.37 This relatively rare subject in painting would have been known to Chaplin through Byron’s 1821 tragedy Marino Faliero and possibly through Delacroix’s 1825–26 picture of Faliero’s beheading (now Wallace Collection, London).38 It is perhaps only a coincidence that the mixed-race New Orleans-born playwright Victor Séjour also cited the career of Faliero in one of his successful Parisian melodramas of the 1850s;39 it may be more to the point to observe that well-educated free African Americans in Pennsylvania or Washington could be as conversant with these European literary and historical references as Séjour was. Chaplin is said to have studied in Germany (Düsseldorf ?), but I have found no concrete evidence that this is so.40 Nevertheless, his choice of complex narrative historical and even allegorical subjects certainly suggests he felt some affiliation with that tradition, best represented in the United States at this time by Leutze.

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After finishing with Thomas’s collection, Box turns briefly to another side of learned African American life in Washington and notes the formation of the Washington Lyceum, a literary association of young men of color, and its president, Benjamin T. Tanner. Tanner (b. 1835) was a young and ambitious preacher in the A.M.E. Church who would go on to become an influential cleric and educator; in 1860 he was also the father of a one-year-old son, Henry Ossawa Tanner, later the first African American painter to achieve a fully successful career as an expatriate in Europe, beginning in 1891. Benjamin Tanner surely read this and other newspaper articles about and by Edward Thomas (and probably saw his collection), and an eventual effect on the direction of Henry O. Tanner’s life cannot be excluded.41 About a year later an assiduous reader of the Weekly Anglo-African would have encountered another endorsement of the pursuit of artistic greatness as an appropriate goal for African Americans. On November 2, 1861, the newspaper reprinted “The Unknown Painter,” a short story that had been in circulation since the 1830s.42 This sentimental tale purports to be a faithful account of one of the Spanish painter Murillo’s menial servants, a young “mulatto” slave who has secretly learned to paint by watching his master. Murillo is astonished by his skill and rewards the boy by emancipating both him and his enslaved father. While there is no historical evidence for the drama of the story, a mixed-race painter named Sebastián Gómez did work in Seville during and shortly after Murillo’s lifetime and may have started out as the artist’s enslaved servant.43 It would not be surprising if Edward Thomas had suggested the publication of this story, because a month or so later he began to campaign, in the pages of the Weekly Anglo-African, for the creation of an exhibition of African American arts and technology. He wrote a letter on December 16, 1861 (published February 8,

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1862), entitled “Anglo-African Exhibition of Industry and Art.” This was to be a big exhibition in “one of our central cities”—either New York or Brooklyn, as specified in a brief April 12 update.44 The fine-arts component was clearly dearest to Thomas, and he argues that such an event could rescue from obscurity “gems of art” and encourage productive rivalry and achievement. Women were enthusiastically welcomed as exhibitors. The need for adequate black patronage of the arts was on his mind, and Thomas cites the Medici’s support of Michelangelo as a relationship to be emulated. The early Michelangelo work he mentions here was, paradoxically, an impossibly white work of art, the Tuscan sculptor’s ephemeral satyr carved out of snow. (Thomas’s source on this was probably either Vasari or a poem by the pro-abolition Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Casa Guidi Windows.”)45 As a negative model of artistic support, Thomas cites the “sordid patrons” of the Renaissance painter Correggio. But, Thomas argues, with active and enlightened patronage, the public might discover another Raphael, Titian, Fra Bartolomeo, Da Vinci, or Murillo. African Americans may already have treasures in their art collections, an idea Thomas illustrates with the story of a beggar who was found to own a Murillo painting. And, he affirms, there are artists of color ready to embrace such an exhibition. “Who has not heard of the unsurpassed Chaplin of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania?—the inimitable Duncanson of Cincinnati?—the merited fame of a Simpson of Boston?—the aspiring genius of a Dorsey of Philadelphia?—the wellearned celebrity of a Bowser of Philadelphia, or the astonishing Naturalist, S. G. Brown, of Washington, D.C.”46 The editors endorsed the proposal in the very same issue and hinted that others were already thinking of a similar project.47 Two weeks later, in the Weekly Anglo-African of February 22, both a columnist and a female letter writer from Boston approved of Thomas’s idea and

began to suggest a few additional names of African American artists.48 On March 22 another letter from Thomas appeared, reporting that he had heard from other enthusiasts and renewing his emphasis on how crucial patronage had been for Greek sculpture, Roman literature, and Renaissance painting (with the Medici’s relations with Michelangelo, Raphael, Da Vinci, Bandinelli, and Correggio cited as examples). Thomas also announced that the Reverend James Gloucester, in Brooklyn, had offered space for the exhibition. Gloucester (whose father had established black Presbyterianism in Philadelphia) was the pastor of the newly rebuilt Siloam Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn and presided over an activist, antislavery congregation. In order to buttress his claim to have been the first to conceive of the exhibition, Thomas mentioned that he had discussed the idea with Chaplin three years previously.49 On March 29 an official call for submissions, entitled “Colored Inventors, Artists, Mechanics, &c.,” was published in the journal, and it was reprinted throughout the month of April.50 On the twelfth of that month Thomas’s praise of Chaplin’s Adoration of the Magi (cited above) appeared, and on the nineteenth Reverend Gloucester himself weighed in with encouragement for the project, naming Thomas and “Prof. Sol. G. Brown” as among the organizers.51 On April 26 a columnist who signed himself “critic” wrote in praise of Dorsey’s watercolors, including a winter scene in Germany and a temple in ruins—this latter work matching a subject already in Thomas’s collection in 1860.52 Unfortunately, from May to December of 1862 little of the Weekly Anglo-African survives, so to follow the thread of Thomas’s interest in the visual arts for that period one must turn to other sources. Already on February 1, 1862, a letter (dated January 2) promoting the fine arts appeared in the A.M.E. Church’s central organ, the Christian Recorder, and though it is signed by one “Edward M. Brown,” it is

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certainly by Edward M. Thomas, as it is almost identical with Thomas’s Anglo-African letter dated December 16, 1861 (but published a week later than the Recorder’s, on February 8, 1862).53 Like the pieces in the Weekly Anglo-African, it focuses on artists in Philadelphia and Washington and is obsessed with the Italian tradition. But Thomas’s further reflections upon the visual arts and their role in racial “elevation” are to be found in a more obscure journal, the monthly Repository of Religion and Literature and of Science and Art, published in Indianapolis on behalf of the literary societies of the A.M.E. Church’s Baltimore, Indiana, Missouri, Philadelphia, and New England Conferences and edited by John M. Brown.54 In four essays simply entitled “Art,” published from June to October of 1862, Thomas lays out an extended argument. His purpose is articulated at the beginning of the first segment: “I propose in this article to touch upon the various points, and give expression to the various reflections and motives that should induce us, as a race, to attend to a proper cultivation of the Fine Arts in all their different departments.”55 Sculpture and painting, rather than printmaking or the decorative arts, are his focus, but he recognizes that degrees of affluence will affect the kind of objects African American consumers can acquire, with “plaster statuettes” (does he have Parian in mind?) decorating “the poor man’s habitation” and “costly painting” decorating “the rich man’s walls.” Above all, an appreciation of great works will cultivate the “higher sentiments” and lead to a deeper veneration of God. Thomas’s July installment is devoted to the masterworks he had seen on European tours.56 Thomas left no other account of his travels, but the works listed imply that Florence, Rome, and Milan were on his itinerary, and all the objects mentioned (except for Rubens’s Descent from the Cross in Antwerp) are from Italy. The Apollo Belvedere and the Medici Venus represent antiquity, while the Renaissance pictures include

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Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Raphael’s Transfiguration, Leonardo’s Last Supper, and Titian’s Venus (presumably the Venus of Urbino in the Uffizi). In his August installment, Thomas—unlike most American travelers to Italy in this era—also cites with respect the proto-Renaissance Italian painters Giotto and Cimabue, in the context of a discussion about how the thirst for fame can lead to great achievement.57 Thomas did not contribute to the September issue, and in the October one—after a discussion of the crucial nature of enlightened patronage—he excuses that gap by alluding to “pressing engagements.”58 Though Thomas affirmed that he was planning additional installments, beginning with one on particular patrons of the past, no further essays by him appeared in this publication after October 1862. Thomas’s obsession with the fine arts and their history in the period from December 1861 to October 1862 is especially striking given the profound changes in the status of African Americans that occurred during these months: first the emancipation of slaves in the capital and then (on September 22) Lincoln’s announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. Thomas, surprisingly, was much involved with this course of events. Lincoln had for some time been attached to the idea that some colonization scheme might resolve the problem of racial conflict in the country, and on August 10 he suddenly decided to meet with African American leaders to discuss this issue. Time was short, so the president’s call for a group of leaders was quickly disseminated to the city’s black churches, and a meeting was convened at Thomas’s Union Bethel A.M.E. Church on August 14. A committee of five was formed, with Thomas as chair, with a majority who were also members of the SCSA. The members were leery of being lobbied by Lincoln to promote colonization, and the SCSA had recently acted vigorously to discourage recruitment for one of

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these schemes. Before they rather reluctantly went to the White House later that day, the committee of five passed resolutions expressing concern that this was not the time to promote emigration and recognizing that they did not necessarily constitute a fairly chosen group to negotiate on this subject with the president. Apparently one of the facilitators of this imperfect process was an African American man well known to Lincoln, William Slade, the lead servant in the White House and also the president of the SCSA. (Slade is discussed in chapter 3 as the author of the poem “The Slave to His Star,” published in the Weekly Anglo-African, September 19, 1863.) Both Slade and Thomas were familiar to powerful white officeholders through their positions in the White House and the House of Representatives. Colonization had generally been fading in its appeal to African Americans, and though the committee listened to Lincoln’s pitch, they pledged only to consider his plan and respond later. Thomas, however, wrote individually to Lincoln afterward, suggesting that colonization was well worth further exploration, and sketched a plan for further consultations in other cities without checking with his committee. This prompted serious dissatisfaction among the local African American community, including other members of Thomas’s committee, and led to acrimonious critiques of Thomas and the legitimacy of the committee.59 These, then, were the “pressing engagements” that had temporarily interrupted Thomas’s essays on art. The issues did not go away, and Thomas, in letters published in the Weekly Anglo-African in early January of 1863, tried to defend himself against several accusations.60 But despite this personal setback, Thomas by no means abandoned his exhibition project. On January 3, 1863—two days after the Emancipation Proclamation came into force—the Weekly Anglo-African published not only one of Thomas’s letters of self-vindication in the Lincoln-colonization affair but also an elaborate

advertisement for the first exhibition of the AngloAfrican Institute for the Encouragement of Industry and Art (fig. 112), set to take place in New York City in October of 1863. The advertisement emphasized the scope of the exhibition and the financial mechanism that would support it, and provided a program of the “opening exercises.” The exhibition would include the mechanical and the fine and decorative arts, as well as cookery, confectionary, and hairdressing. Appearing third on the long list, after steam engines and musical instruments, are works of art, broken down into “oil-paintings, water colors, engravings, ambrotypes, photographs, &c.” Further down the list, woodwork, jewelry, embroidery, and apparel also appear, though sculpture is not mentioned. The funding was to be arranged through a joint-stock company called the Anglo-African Institute, with shares for sale at five dollars each. Thomas was the president, and among the other officers were Bishop Daniel Payne of the A.M.E. Church, the Reverend John Peterson of an African American Episcopalian church in New York, and the Weekly Anglo-African’s publisher, Thomas Hamilton. Among the remaining twelve board members were the African American artists Chaplin, Dorsey, Simpson, and Edward Bannister (of Boston), as well as James Gloucester (the Brooklyn Presbyterian pastor) and Solomon Brown (the Smithsonian employee). Five “Lady Managers” were also listed.61 At the opening exercises, the speakers were to be the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet (a prayer), Thomas himself (opening remarks), Frederick Douglass (the opening address), and William J. Wilson (an original poem). There were to be musical performances and lectures on every day of the exhibition, the length of whose run was not specified. The advertisement ran more or less weekly from January through July 11. But sadly, Thomas died (at only forty-two) on March 9, 1863, with his last months still clouded by the controversy over his meeting with

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Lincoln. In death, however, his friends rallied round him, and an obituary and accounts of his rather grand funeral highlighted his artistic efforts, mentioning the national exhibition and its planning organization, in these pieces called the Anglo-African Institution of Industry and Art.62 By April, Thomas’s name had been taken out of the exhibition advertisement, and on May 9 a columnist (A) pleaded for a new exhibition president to step forward to take Thomas’s place.63 This writer argued that the project remained essential: “In view of the many rapid changes now occurring in public sentiment, and in the policy of the national administration, these, with many other things that can not here be enumerated, point with unerring precision to the inestimable necessity of our people, not only in harnessing themselves for blood-besmeared battlefields, but also to force our minds and muscles to the production of works of utility for the ‘Exhibition,’ that when our heroic fathers, brothers and sons return from the grim war, we of the chivalric ‘home guard,’ may not be thrown aside as men, unworthy of the age.” But no new leader seems to have stepped forward, and after the murderous New York City draft riots in mid-July, which profoundly shook the city’s black community, the advertisements for the exhibition ceased to appear. Several months before that disruption, on April 18, 1863, the Weekly Anglo-African published a poetic tribute to Thomas’s memory by the African American journalist and activist A. P. Smith (1832–1901): i Votaries of Art’s shrine—

f ig ur e 112 “The First Exhibition of the Anglo-African Institute for the Encouragement of Industry and Art,” advertisement in the Anglo-African, January 3, 1863, 4. Photo: author.

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Bow the head in grief; Weep your fallen great, Pure and manly chief. ii Thomas—spirit pure— Seeking to restore Art’s preeminence,

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Ancient Afric bore. iii Pour the meed [sic] I bring, Paid by humble muse; Worthier tribute far Art will not refuse, iv She her patron mourns, With a tear-dimmed eye; She thy name will grave Where it ne’er can die. v Thou, though dead, shalt live On the canvas bold; Thou inspired shall speak From the granite cold!64 Smith celebrates Thomas purely in terms of his efforts in the arts, suggesting he will live on in the media of painting and sculpture that he had so celebrated. Though Smith’s “granite cold” might denote Thomas’s tombstone, it might also, like “canvas bold,” allude to a figurative work of art. Indeed, Thomas had been depicted both in paint and in stone. As already cited above, a portrait of him by an unnamed Boston African American painter, probably William Simpson, is recorded in the Weekly Anglo-African in November of 1860. Sometime between that date and his death, a marble bust of Thomas had been produced by the white sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, who passed the winters of 1860 and 1861 in Washington carving portraits.65 Neither the painting nor the sculpture is known today. Ward’s likeness of Thomas is one of the very first recorded portrait busts of an African American subject.66 Although painted portraits of black subjects go back a long way in American art, and photographic daguerreotype and ambrotype portraits of African Americans multiplied rapidly in the late 1840s and 1850s, the breaking of the barrier to sculptural likenesses is notable. Though the bust of Thomas was evidently privately commissioned, this format is inherently more

public and elevated than a painting, suggesting that the subject was worthy of public admiration. Thomas no doubt would have preferred an African American maker for his bust, but among the black artists he promoted and collected, no sculptor appears. Ward (1830–1910), however, was an extremely interesting choice among white sculptors. An Ohio native, he had been trained by Henry Kirke Brown, the sculptor whose various and mostly unsuccessful attempts to include African American figures in public sculpture (see fig. 75) I have already chronicled. In 1860 Ward executed busts of Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s vice president, and Senator John Parker Hale of New Hampshire, one of the most stalwart abolitionists in Congress.67 In the fall of 1862 he began work on his bronze Freedman (completed 1863) (see fig. 89), generally acknowledged to be the frankest and most vigorous commemoration of emancipation by a white American artist.68 Also from the 1860s, and perhaps from around the time of the Freedman, are a pair of small bronze reliefs of an African American boy and a Native American girl that Ward affixed to one of his cupboards.69 He also made a much larger bronze relief of an African American man in 1898, and his 1891 memorial to Henry Ward Beecher, the influential preacher and antislavery activist (and Stowe’s brother), includes a graceful, if subordinate, figure of a young African American woman.70 It is thus a distinct possibility that Ward’s bust of Thomas was his first foray into a theme important to his identity as a sculptor. Thomas was a married man, but little is known of his wife. She presumably retained her husband’s collection after his untimely death, but on January 10, 1865, his coins, autographs, and at least some of his books were auctioned in Washington. In a brief published account of this sale Thomas is described as “a colored man, for many years messenger to the House of Representatives. Surmounting the prejudices of caste

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and the disadvantages of a want of early education, he devoted his leisure hours and limited means, for many years, to artistic and literary objects.”71 The description also makes clear that some of the autographs were in fact documents relevant to African American history, such as a letter by Lafayette expressing deep hostility to American slavery. Unfortunately, the name of the auction house is not cited, and nothing at all is said of Thomas’s paintings, prints, or sculptures. At least one of these, however, clearly passed to the next major African American collector, William Dorsey (1837–1923).

w il l i am d or se y, john w e s l e y c r om w e l l , and f r e e m an h . m . mur ray

Dorsey’s work as a watercolorist has already come up several times in this chapter, and he was a board member of Thomas’s institute.72 Thomas owned and promoted his work. But Dorsey seems to have been committed to a career as an artist only for a few years in his twenties. His passion, it soon became clear, was collecting, and though this might have begun with works of visual art, it soon expanded well beyond Thomas’s range. By the end of the century Dorsey had compiled nearly four hundred scrapbooks containing newspaper articles and ephemera relating to his wide interests, including not only the fine arts but natural history and crime, among many others. His deep interest in African American history, biography, politics, and contemporary achievement is reflected in the scrapbooks. He had the leisure and financial wherewithal to pursue this compulsive collecting and scrapbooking thanks to his father, who had built a thriving catering business in Philadelphia. Much of Dorsey’s income later in life seems to have come from rents from the buildings he owned, presumably bought with his father’s profits. Though Dorsey’s art collection is largely dispersed, an archive of 196

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his scrapbooks and other textual and visual material is preserved at Cheyney University outside Philadelphia, an institution founded by Quakers as the Institute for Colored Youth in the 1820s.73 The earliest known description of Dorsey’s collection appeared in Frederick Douglass’s New National Era, on October 1, 1874, in an article by John Wesley Cromwell (1846–1927) entitled “An Art Gallery and Museum, Not in the Guide Book.” Cromwell describes a visit to Dorsey with words reminiscent of Box’s 1860 visit to Thomas: “It was in the front room of the second-story of one of those small but cosy homes of the many narrow streets of Philadelphia that we were ushered into a miniature museum and art gallery, the private collection of our old friend, Mr. William H. Dorsey, of that city.” At this early stage the collection was not dominated by the scrapbooks, which multiplied in later decades, and Cromwell begins with a description of visual images, weapons, and geological specimens: “To the lover of art, the admirer of rare curiosities, or the antiquarian, the collection of Mr. Dorsey would alike afford delight; the coins and minerals, the implements of warfare, used by savage and barbarous nations, the ancient mosaics, the fine engravings, the oil and water color paintings by artists of established reputation, would repay a most critical examination.” Even more than Thomas’s collection, this sounds like a space in the Kunstkammer tradition and is also reminiscent, in scope if not in size, of Charles Willson Peale’s museum and art gallery in Baltimore. Cromwell first touches on a miscellany of mostly European artworks, including a relief of Charlemagne in Italian marble and a painting on glass of St. Peter’s in Rome. Some of these works sound like objects made for the European tourist trade. Cromwell also mentions a portfolio of engravings after ancient carved gems, and lavishly illustrated volumes on Thorvaldsen and on the school of Raphael. The Philadelphia context is emphasized by a curious memento,

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“a piece of stair taken from the house of Sully, the artist.” The next section of the collection described by Cromwell emphasizes the owner’s interest in the history of the African diaspora: “The collection of books and pamphlets, published by, and concerning colored men and women,—the music by colored composers— the number of steel and copper-plate engravings of eminent negroes, and photographs, autograph letters, autograph and fac-similies of men prominent in our race is very extensive, interesting, and valuable.” This is strongly reminiscent of T. Morris Chester’s 1862 exhortations. The particular works Cromwell mentions in this category are initially largely European, though he includes an 1801 London edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poems; eventually he turns to more familiar modern American figures like Douglass and Martin Delany. At this point Cromwell returns to works of sculpture and painting, highlighting Ward’s “fine bust of the late Edward Thomas.” He emphasizes that Thomas had been “a patron of art, and an enthusiast in his desire to have his race manifest the same appreciation.” Cromwell does not say that the bust came from Thomas’s estate, but it is hard to imagine that this was not its source. Dorsey was much involved with Thomas’s funeral and certainly would have had the opportunity to acquire objects from his estate.74 Next on the list comes Robert Duncanson, who Cromwell says gave Dorsey a painting entitled The Evening. The writer then moves on to John Chaplin, “a graduate of one of the most celebrated art schools of Germany,” whom Thomas had championed in the early 1860s. Chaplin’s Dream of Nebuchadnezzar, meant for the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, is now mentioned; Dorsey’s collection includes both original works (“King Lear, in the storm scene, Macbeth, Mephistopheles in Faust, Emancipation, and the Nubian”) and copies, including a portrait of Toussaint from a photograph, as well as works after Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Some paragraphs later,

Cromwell returns to visual and textual memorials of heroes of the African diaspora. These include engravings of Bishops Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, provided by Allen’s daughter; and images or mementos of Frederick Douglass, Ira Aldridge, Alexander Dumas père and fils, Cinque, other Haitian leaders, and “St. Benedict, a black priest of the order of St. Francis” (this last presumably an image). The Afro-Sicilian Benedict (d. 1589) was in fact a monk, not a priest, but it is especially interesting to see this inclusion of a sixteenth-century Italian Catholic in a collection otherwise oriented toward the established African American Protestant denominations.75 Cromwell himself, in fact, was an active member of the Union Bethel A.M.E. Church, and he connects in an intriguing way both to Edward Thomas and to a younger generation of African Americans intent on exploring the black past. Cromwell was a lawyer as well as a journalist; he was also an employee of the Treasury and Post Office Departments in Washington between 1874 and 1885.76 In 1876 he founded his own newspaper in Alexandria, Virginia, called the People’s Advocate, which in 1877 printed yet another call (from the anonymous “Blackibus”) for an expansion of African American visual art, to which William Dorsey responded with an account of what had already been accomplished as well as the many obstacles faced by artists of color.77 In 1881 Cromwell successfully reconstituted Union Bethel’s Literary and Historical Society—over which Edward Thomas had presided from 1859 until his death, in 1863—and in 1896 he published a pamphlet about the society’s active programming since its refounding.78 He helped to found and direct the American Negro Academy in 1897 and later worked with Arthur Schomburg in this regard.79 Most notably for my purposes, Cromwell wrote the introduction to Freeman H. M. Murray’s 1916 Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture, the first sustained

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(and still fundamental) critical look at American depictions of African American subjects.80 Thus a real line of influence can be drawn from Edward Thomas and William Dorsey to Freeman Murray and the rise of black scholarship and art criticism in the early twentieth century. Though Murray’s published volume dwells on American images, Murray notes in his preface that he is broadly interested in the European visual tradition of depicting what he terms “Black Folk” and that his volume’s narrow focus is somewhat accidental.81 Cromwell, in his introduction, describes Murray’s initial attraction to the theme as a consequence of his being irritated by the failure of many American artists to follow the standard European iconography of the dark-skinned Wise Man in the Adoration of the Magi.82 Indeed, Murray’s eloquent essay on this topic, one of the first serious scholarly forays into European art by an African American author, was published in the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review in 1912.83 In this essay Murray celebrates the recent acquisition by the National Gallery in London of a famous, early sixteenth-century Adoration of the Magi by Jan Gossaert (also called Mabuse) (fig. 113), emphasizing that the Flemish artist had chosen to sign his name on the garments of the African Magus and his dark-skinned attendant (fig. 114).84 Murray contrasts this attachment to the black presence in Gossaert’s work with the timid avoidance of the inclusive theme in recent white-American arts and letters. He even gently reproached Henry Ossawa Tanner for not yet having taken up the Magi or some other biblical subject that might incorporate an African character endorsed by the European tradition.85

mart i n de l any

Murray, then, like many of his nineteenth-century predecessors, endorsed the traditions of Western art but insisted that American artists had a specific duty to

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locate and make use of those iconographic elements embedded within it that confirm the full humanity of people of color. However, one African American leader during the Civil War era was invested in a more radical transformation of normative Euro-American visual forms. Scholars have often discussed the especially vexed history of the Freedman’s Memorial project, which sprang to life shortly after Lincoln’s assassination with a five-dollar contribution by the recently emancipated Charlotte Scott and quickly developed into an ambitious project that sought funding from all American women.86 The Rome-based American sculptor Harriet Hosmer offered the most plausible designs in late 1865 and 1866 (see fig. 123), but she eventually lost hold of the commission; Thomas Ball, who completed it in 1876, produced a regressive work (see fig. 99) that emphasized black subordination and presented Lincoln as a dominant, benevolent master.87 No one seems to have observed, however, that an African American intellectual early on proposed a design that virtually ignored Lincoln and instead prescribed a passionate African figure as the focus of the monument. The proposal appeared in the form of a letter (dated May 27) to the Weekly Anglo-African published on June 10, 1865.88 Its author was Martin Delany (1812–1885), then the highest-ranking African American officer (a major) in the Union army, and he wrote from his military post in Charleston, South Carolina. Delany was a journalist and abolitionist who had worked with Frederick Douglass, and also a physician; few black leaders had a higher profile at this moment. Delany says nothing of the upper part of the monument but instead focuses his idea on the south side of the base. He explains that this is the most important cardinal point for such a monument, “it being the south from which the great Queen of Ethiopia came with great offerings to the Temple at Jerusalem, the south from which the Ethiopian Ambassador came to worship at Jerusalem,

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f ig ur e 113 Jan Gossaert (Mabuse), Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1506–16. Oil on wood, 179.8 × 163.2 cm. National Gallery, London, 2790. Photo © The National Gallery, London.

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f ig ur e 114 Jan Gossaert (Mabuse), Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1506–16 (fig. 113), detail.

as well as the south from which the greatest part of our offerings come to contribute to this testimonial.” He here conjoins the emancipated slaves of the South with two biblical passages—the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon (in the Old Testament, 3 Kings 10:1–10 and 2 Chronicles 9:1–12) and the conversion of the Queen of Ethiopia’s eunuch to Christianity (in the New Testament, Acts 8:27–40)—which had often been illustrated by earlier European artists with dark-skinned figures.89 But he does not suggest these stories should be depicted. Instead, he specifies that this side of the base should feature a kneeling weeping woman whose manifold tears fall into an urn. The tears are to denote the sorrow of the four million men and women who had been enslaved at the outbreak of the war.90 While a kneeling figure is reminiscent of the Wedgwood antislavery emblem (Am I Not a Man and a Brother?) (see fig. 21) and its later female variant (Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?), Delany avoids any mention of chains or shackles, and he stresses that the woman’s body should

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be chastely covered, which would have sharply diminished the resemblance to those earlier reliefs. Delany concludes his design specifications with these emphatic words: “This figure is neither to be Grecian, Caucasian, nor Anglo-Saxon, Mongolian, nor Indian, but African—very African—an ideal representative genus of the race, as Europa, Brittania, America, or the Goddess of Liberty, is to the European race.” This passage almost reads as a critique of William Wetmore Story’s timidly African Libyan Sibyl (see fig. 33), intended to express a similar mourning over slavery; Delany surely knew of that work and perhaps of the nervous reviews of its ethnicity by white critics.91 As to who might create such an artwork, Delany boldly suggests that the New York– based African American engraver and lithographer Patrick Reason (1816–1898) “might sketch out the outlines of a good representation of this design.”92 No further development of this plan is known, though the chastely covered kneeling woman in Edmonia Lewis’s Forever Free (see fig. 4) might owe something to Delany’s vision. Delany’s forthright idea deserves to be better known; along with William Cooper Nell’s 1851 proposal for a Crispus Attucks monument and Henry Highland Garnet’s 1863 assertion of the need for grand memorials to Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, it belongs to a notable conceptual chapter in the history of African American art.93

jo s h ua bow en s m i t h

Garnet’s and Nell’s monument proposals remained unrealized, and the Lincoln/emancipation memorial project was appropriated by white patrons and eventually resulted in a feeble work that reinforced the subordination of blacks (see fig. 99). But it may be noted that the one indubitably great monument to the Civil War and emancipation, the Shaw Memorial, was first conceptualized and proposed by an African American.

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Joshua Bowen Smith (1813–1879), a successful Cambridge caterer, political activist, and representative in the Massachusetts legislature, was, with William Cooper Nell, one of the 1851 petitioners to the Massachusetts authorities for the proposed Attucks memorial.94 As early as 1842 Smith had been involved with antislavery agitation. He had evidently worked for the family of Robert Gould Shaw, and after the death of Colonel Shaw and many of his black troops in the assault at Fort Wagner, it was Smith (along with several other unnamed African Americans) who first conceived of a monument to this commander. Smith’s good friend Charles Sumner (by whom he was also employed) advised Smith to wait until the war’s end; in October of 1865 Smith made a significant initial donation of $500 to the fund, issued a call for African American contributors, and (with Sumner) convened a committee to pursue the plan. Smith’s vision was of an equestrian monument, and when several members of the committee challenged this, he took a hard line (successful in the end) against any alteration.95 It is not known if Smith or anyone else on the committee had in mind, at this early stage, any representation of the troops under Shaw’s command. Though a number of contributions to the fund were made, the project languished in the 1870s, to be taken up again (without Smith or Sumner) in the 1880s and reaching completion (by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens) in 1897 (fig. 115), with the equestrian figure of Shaw still the centerpiece but now complemented by a magnificent array of black infantrymen.96 In addition to Smith’s advocacy for both the Attucks and the Shaw monuments, his interest in the visual arts had other manifestations. In 1875 the British radical Charles Bradlaugh paid a visit to Smith’s house in Cambridge, which he found to be something of a shrine to Sumner (who had died the previous year) and abolition. Smith had portraits of William Lloyd

Garrison and Sumner, and he also owned the senator’s tea service and the wreath that had rested on Sumner’s coffin. But his most singular possession was a picture that Sumner had willed to Smith, an oil painting (measuring three by four feet), “said to be a Tintoretto, showing a white slave with bonds miraculously broken, and against whom the executioner’s weapons lose their force; this picture, much valued by Sumner, was specially willed to his much-loved and much trusted colored friend.”97 Though this work is not known today, it was clearly a version of Tintoretto’s famous Miracle of the Slave (fig. 116), painted in 1548 for the Venetian Scuola Grande di San Marco (now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia).98 The Accademia painting, like the version owned by Sumner and Smith, features Saint Mark breaking the bonds of a white Christian slave; among the observers in the Accademia painting, however, are two dark-skinned Africans in Middle Eastern dress (fig. 117), who were presumably also present in this smaller study (or, more likely, copy after it).99 Sumner, who had traveled extensively in Italy and elsewhere in Europe as a young man, was devoted to the visual arts and was a close friend of many American artists.100 He was also a collector of paintings, prints, and sculpture, and visitors to his house in Washington at the end of his life were impressed by his treasures and his taste.101 In his will he left his few sculptures to Longfellow and Samuel Gridley Howe but all his paintings and prints—except for the Miracle of the Slave, bequeathed to Smith—to the new Boston Museum of Fine Arts then being planned.102 The gift of the painting to Smith was not a casual choice. The sequence of events leading to the gift began by 1849, when John Greenleaf Whittier wrote an antislavery poem, “Legend of St. Mark,” about Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave and its story, later remarking that Sumner had called his attention to the painting.103 Smith, who had most likely grown up as a free

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f ig ur e 115 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Shaw Memorial, 1897. Bronze. Boston Common. Photo: Hickey & Robertson, Houston / The Menil Foundation.

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f ig ur e 116 Jacopo Tintoretto, Miracle of the Slave, 1548. Oil on canvas, 415 × 541 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Alinari  / Art Resource, New York (Mauro Magliani, 1998).

person of color in Pennsylvania and had lived for a time in New Bedford, played a public role in denouncing the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston in 1850.104 In the midst of this agitation, he heard a famous speech of Sumner’s, “Our Immediate Anti-slavery Duties,” delivered at a meeting at Faneuil Hall on November 6. Sumner cited Tintoretto’s picture as a template for his

own intervention: “There is a legend of the Church, still living on the admired canvas of a Venetian artist, that St. Mark, descending from the skies with headlong fury into a public square, broke the manacles of a slave in the very presence of the judge who had decreed his fate. This is known as the ‘Miracle of the Slave,’ and grandly has Art illumined the theme.”105

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Several years later, in Europe, Sumner acquired his version of the composition.106 In 1860 Smith wrote to Sumner, introducing himself as one committed to “the elevation of his race.”107 Throughout the 1860s the correspondence between the two men shifted back and forth from Smith’s work for Sumner (involving food, furniture, and other practical matters) to the pair’s political preoccupations, both during and after the war.108 The most striking of these letters dates to March 31, 1870, the day after the final adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, giving African American men the franchise. Smith writes (with a passion also evident in his rapid hand): The great battle is over—victory has been proclaimed—the Second St. Mark has come. So have the chains been broken—the Mantle of Honour must rest upon your Shoulders as the greatest champion of liberty of this or any other age—I never can forget the words spoken by you in Faneuil Hall—let my people go—they have gone free—to you more than any other person the Honour is due—I want to see you more than I ever did before—to thank you face to face for what you have done—God bless Hon Charles Sumner—faithfully, your friend JBSmith.109

f ig ur e 117 Jacopo Tintoretto, Miracle of the Slave, 1548 (fig. 116), detail. Photo: Scala / Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali / Art Resource, New York.

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Sumner’s decision to leave the picture to Smith must have crystallized as he read this note. One wonders if anything was said of it in the last hours of Sumner’s life, when Smith—by then a Massachusetts state senator—arrived at his friend’s bedside with a gift of his own: the official revocation, proposed and engineered by Smith, of the senate’s hasty censure of Sumner for having broached the idea of political compromise with a group of white Southern politicians.110 Neither Sumner’s nor Smith’s attachment to the painting and the Saint Mark narrative it illustrated

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should be interpreted as acquiescence to religious quietism about the evils of slavery—the idea that the slave would get his reward in the afterlife. Sumner was famously skeptical of organized religion, and Smith, at an 1858 New Bedford antislavery meeting, had this to say: “It is a great misfortune that the colored man is so submissive. He is too religious in the wrong way. His fears are played upon. He is taught to look forward to the new Jerusalem, as an asylum from all his woes. He wants a part of that new Jerusalem here. . . . We were told that God, in His own time, would work out deliverance. God’s time to do right was now.”111 Such immediate deliverance is just what Saint Mark provides in the Tintoretto composition.

This episode reveals yet another path by which the appreciation of earlier European art could serve as a politically charged discourse about race and slavery, not only among African Americans and between white men of differing ideological positions, like Norton and Ruskin, but also between African Americans and their white allies. As in the previous chapter, it was Venetian Renaissance painting, with its conspicuous touches of the exotic, that was deployed, but to very different ends. In the next chapter, Venetian Renaissance painting appears once more, but in yet another light: as a cultural achievement that an African American introduced to a white American audience.

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6

Contraband Guide Mark Twain on Race and the Renaissance

T

he pr omo t ion of the Western high-art tradition as a tool for racial “uplift” was, as shown above, a recurring feature in the writings of African American leaders before, during, and just after the Civil War. Progressive white Americans were less engaged with this cultural agenda, although Stowe’s assistance to Eugène Warburg and the advocacy of Edmonia Lewis’s career by Lydia Maria Child and others in her circle were nevertheless important. White abolitionist men generally ignored this discourse and instead stressed the familiar theme of literacy as an essential skill for the new, broad class of African American citizens. One can see something of this variation in emphasis in the works of the visiting Swiss painter Frank Buchser, who spent four active years in the United States (1866–70). Though Buchser had come to Washington, D.C., with a commission to depict the newly victorious white leaders of the republic, he was immediately fascinated by African Americans, whom he rendered in about a dozen paintings and hundreds of drawings.1 Buchser’s images of American blacks are a rich bundle of contradictions. There is no doubt that he was a supporter of the aims of Reconstruction, and his most effective painting from this period shows a black soldier having

returned from the war and regaling his young friends.2 Yet nearly all of Buchser’s genre images of African American life are still circumscribed by behavioral stereotypes associated with slavery, such as the love of music and idleness, which were already entrenched in William Sidney Mount’s prewar pictures. Several of Buchser’s compositions do stress the critical role of literacy.3 However, the one work of Buchser’s that directly takes up the African American response to the fine arts is one of his most retrograde efforts. Painted in 1869, Buchser entitled the picture Art Student or Rising Taste (fig. 118).4 It depicts a young African American bootblack in ragged clothing—probably one of Buchser’s several black models—perusing the walls of the artist’s Washington studio. He has passed by an oil sketch by Buchser of a dark-skinned man holding a hat, and another small work that may be one of Buchser’s studies of the houses of African Americans in Charlottesville, Virginia. Above these works hangs a banjo, which in other images Buchser often showed in the hands of blacks.5 Ignoring all these, the bootblack—with a smoking cigar in his mouth—has turned his attention exclusively to an image of white women disrobing and bathing in a stream, of a type that Buchser also produced.6 The bootblack is not

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presented as an art student, or rather he is the lowest imaginable version of a painter: in his work he takes a single dark color and rubs it into a shoe. His “rising taste” is only a transgressive erotic fixation on white female bodies, although, to be fair, Buchser readily acknowledged his own erotic fixation on black as well as white female bodies in his own work.7 Buchser appears to have had no dealings with members of the African American elite in Washington, and while his pictures were positively evaluated by white critics, they were ignored in the African American press.8 It is easy to imagine how appalled Edward Thomas, William Dorsey, or John Cromwell would have been at the imagery of Art Student or Rising Taste. As for Buchser’s impression of African American visual art, the only allusion to this in his work is a stick-figure captioned “Jhon Brown” [sic] drawn on a decaying wall behind a group of young African American bootblacks playing marbles (fig. 119).9 Buchser, despite his fascination with African Americans during his American years, was ultimately an outsider who prized exotic marginality in American life, and he had little sense of the complex cultural issues of the Reconstruction period. His 1869 Art Student stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from a still little-known passage in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, published in the same year. Samuel Clemens’s first visit to Venice, in 1867, was brief, but his account of it in Innocents includes a curious passage under the rubric “A Contraband Guide.” Adopting his usual role as the untutored American encountering the mystifying complexities of European culture, Twain voices his naïve admiration for a series of Venetian paintings. But he is briskly deflated by the cicerone in charge of his tour of the city: In every single instance the guide has crushed out my swelling enthusiasm with the remark: “It is nothing—it is of the Renaissance.” 208

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I did not know what in the mischief the Renaissance was, and so always I had to simply say, “Ah! so it is—I had not observed it before.” I could not bear to be ignorant before a cultivated Negro, the offspring of a South Carolina slave. But it occurred too often for even my self-complacency, did that exasperating “It is nothing—it is of the Renaissance.” I said at last:

figure 118 Frank Buchser, Art Student or Rising Taste, 1869. Oil on canvas, 38.5 × 21 in. Foundation for Art, Culture, and History, Küsnacht, Switzerland. Photo: SIK-ISEA, Zurich (Phillip Hitz).

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f ig ur e 1 1 9 Frank Buchser, Bootblacks Playing Marbles, 1867. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: SIK-ISEA, Zurich (Phillip Hitz).

“Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the republic with his execrable daubs?” We learned then that Renaissance was not a man; that renaissance was a term used to signify what was at best but an imperfect rejuvenation of art. The guide said that after Titian’s time and the time of the other great names we had grown so familiar with, high art declined; then it partially rose up again—an inferior sort of painters sprang up, and these shabby pictures were the work of their hands . . . . The guide I have spoken of is the only one we have had yet who knew anything. He was born in South Carolina, of slave parents. They came to Venice while he was an infant. He has grown up here.

He is well educated. He reads, writes, and speaks English, Italian, Spanish, and French with perfect facility; is a worshiper of art and thoroughly conversant with it; knows the history of Venice by heart and never tires of talking of her illustrious career. He dresses better than any of us, I think, and is daintily polite. Negroes are deemed as good as white people in Venice, and so this man feels no desire to go back to his native land. His judgment is correct.10 Twain, unfortunately, does not give a name to his African American Venetian cicerone. Clemens had embarked on his first transatlantic journey as a journalist for the Alta California, and at least fifteen of the

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detailed letters he composed for this paper, including one from Venice, were lost in transit.11 Clemens had difficulty in recalling small details from the lost letters, and if he had indeed learned the guide’s name and recorded it, it seems to have disappeared into the postal void. My exploration of the vast body of other mid-nineteenth-century American (and European) travel writing about Venice (guidebooks, travel memoirs, journalism) has not yet yielded up another reference to him.12 Three American books, however, do mention an African American who must have been the father of Twain’s guide. In July of 1843 the South Carolina painter James De Veaux went down to breakfast at his Venetian hotel, the famous Leon Bianco (in the Palazzo Correr Martinengo, along the Riva del Carbon near the Rialto), and “met, acting as head waiter in the hotel, a negro from Newbern, N.C., who has been sixteen years in Europe.”13 A few days later, still in Venice, De Veaux and a ship’s captain from Charleston discussed how much they preferred black servants to white ones, and he must have had the hotel headwaiter in mind. De Veaux, in fact, was quick to advert to American racial issues in his European diaries and letters, written during a lengthy stay (mostly in Rome) between 1841 and 1844. I have already mentioned, in chapter 1, how he unexpectedly enjoyed the Ethiopian language he heard during a visit to the Epiphany readings at the Propaganda Fide in Rome in early January of 1843. A month later, in a letter home, he cursed a nephew of Jerome Bonaparte who had given an abolition toast at a Washington’s Birthday dinner in Rome that he had been unable to attend. Had he been there, said De Veaux, he would have “given him a pill of another colour to swallow.”14 A week later, during Carnival, he disturbed a female friend with “negro talk”—was he speaking in mocking dialect as part of the festivities, or was he growling about abolitionists?15 In June a visit to the Vatican

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prompted his mocking critique of the bronze statue of Saint Peter as “a huge blackey giving instruction to a set of dummies.”16 De Veaux’s European diaries and letters were published, after his untimely death there, by his friend Dr. Robert Gibbes, who in 1850 assisted Louis Agassiz in arranging for the infamous “slave daguerreotypes” that remain one of the most troubling visual products of so-called scientific racism.17 A more detailed account of the man I identify as the father of Twain’s guide was provided by Francis Schroeder, the secretary to an American naval commander. In 1845, Schroeder and his party arrived at the Leon Bianco (where De Veaux had stayed): We were received as we got out of the gondola by a runaway New Orleans negro, who, as he informed us, was travelling some years ago with his mistress, but, falling in love in Padua, he was obliged to desert her and marry. His wife is a fair Italian, “who deceived her father”; and they are blessed with children three. He is the chief aid of mine host, and the first man we saw in Venice was this happy counterpart of Othello. He knew us for Americans at once, and welcomed us in English, scolded the gondolier in Italian, and spoke French to Madame de G.’s courier a moment after.18 Schroeder gives this section the subheading of “A ‘Moor.’” The reference to Othello, as mentioned in chapter 1, was not unexpected for an American in Venice in these years, but the connection to a living person was more unusual, as was the transformation of Othello’s tragedy into a happily-ever-after tale. The hotel worker’s multilingual skills parallel those of Twain’s guide. In 1846 the young Philadelphia writer Charles Godfrey Leland, being rowed down the Grand Canal with an American friend, was surprised to see

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sitting before a hotel its porter, who was an unmistakable American man of full colour. Great was Clark’s delight, and he called out, “I say, Buck! what the devil are you doing here?” With a delighted grin, the man and brother replied in deep Southern accent— “Dey sets me hyar fo’ a bait to ’tice de Americans with.” I heard subsequently that he had come from America with his mistress, and served her faithfully till there came into the service a pretty French girl. Great was the anger of the owner of the man to find that he had unmistakably “enticed” the maid. To which he replied that it was a free country; that he had married the damsel—she was his wife; and so the pair at once packed up and departed.19 It might here be observed that the use of an African American hotel worker to “entice” other Americans was a device also used elsewhere in Italy. In 1854 an anonymous New England clergyman wrote: “A genteel looking Mulatto attracts our attention [on entering the port of Naples] by his cool, American air; we inquire the name of his hotel; it is ‘La Crocelle,’ which we have heard highly commended.”20 Leland seems charmed by the Leon Bianco’s porter, but as with Schroeder, his description of the encounter is in the comic register (complete with dialect) so often used by white American writers to emphasize the subordinate racial position of blacks. On the other hand, he refers to the hotel worker using the abolitionist catchphrase “man and brother.” Leland did not publish this memoir until 1893, so it may reflect attitudes of the post-Reconstruction era. Whereas De Veaux emphasized the “natural” servitude of the hotel worker, Schroeder’s and Leland’s accounts, by approvingly citing the worker’s deliberate self-emancipation, challenge the myth of an ingrained

inclination to such servitude on the part of African Americans. Schroeder and Leland also emphasize the worker’s full integration into European life. Like Twain, these travelers from the 1840s—maddeningly—never give an actual name to their subject, and their accounts vary a little, leaving it uncertain whether Twain’s guide had an African American, French, or Paduan mother. Whether his father came from South Carolina, North Carolina, or Louisiana is also unclear. One strongly suspects that both father and son reserved the right to adjust the shape of their life stories to match the prejudices of those who inquired about them. But the connection with the hotel trade (ideal for a cicerone), the enslaved past, the multilingual abilities, and the open acknowledgment of African American identity all link the two men. I have not been able to find a plausible American candidate for Twain’s guide or his putative father in the opaque Venetian census records of the period; those records would not necessarily have listed them as Americans,21 since before the Civil War even free African Americans were generally excluded from citizenship and thus lacked the right to hold an American passport or visa, and there is no evidence that enslaved servants accompanying their masters bore legal papers testifying to their nationality.22 That African American servants, both enslaved and free, accompanied their owners/employers to Europe in the mid-1800s is well attested. Eugène Warburg, it transpires, had not been the first African American man to be associated with U.S. diplomats in Paris. The Democrat William Rufus DeVane King, who held the office of vice president for six weeks before his death, in 1853, left his Alabama senate seat in 1844 to become U.S. minister to France and brought with him “from home a negro, whom he made the ‘major-domo’ of his household” in Paris. The man was described as honest but haughty with local tradesmen and the other

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household servants.23 In 1845 the American sculptor Hiram Powers became involved with an effort to repatriate an African American family, with children, who had been brought over to Florence as servants by a young Louisiana naval officer, Frederick B. Brand, one of Powers’s patrons. They were not legally registered in Florence, which suggests that the same liminal status may have been true of Twain’s guide and his father. They had probably been slaves in Louisiana, but as slavery was not legal in Florence (or in most other regions of western Europe), Brand referred to them as employees, and he was unwilling or unable to pay for their passage back to the United States when he left; they remained in Italy, and nothing further is known of them.24 There were certainly economic risks for ex-slaves in Europe, whether or not they had chosen to leave their owners. In 1853 the Alabama writer and traveler Octavia Le Vert brought her enslaved maid Betsey Lamar to Venice, where her status and group identity puzzled the customs officers.25 (They rejected Lamar’s insistence that she was American, and called her “una moretta.”) David Dorr (first mentioned in chapter 2) traveled extensively in Europe with his owner, Cornelius Fellowes of New Orleans, in 1851–52, and he was well aware of the possibility of self-emancipation. During an 1851 visit to the American section of the Crystal Palace in London, Dorr remarked: “I saw everything that is a prevailing disgrace to our country except slaves. I understood that a South Carolinian proposed taking half a dozen haughty and sinewy negroes to the Fair, but was deterred from that proposition by the want of courage to risk six fat, strong, healthy negroes to the chances of escape from slavery to freedom.”26 Dorr vowed not to walk away from his own enslavement, on the condition that he (and probably also his mother) be manumitted when they returned to the United States; Fellowes did not fulfill the promise, and Dorr

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escaped to the North.27 Dorr met other African Americans abroad, including Frank Parrish, an enslaved barber from Nashville who was traveling with his master, Edwin Ewing, in 1851.28 But there were also free African American servants who came to Europe with their white employers. In Rome in 1859 Harriet Hosmer met one whom she had known in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.29 Charlotte Cushman, the famous actress who was part of the circle of American women sculptors in Rome, had brought her African American servant and assistant Sallie Mercer (fig. 120) to that city in 1852.30 The painter T. Buchanan Read had a servant of color in Rome in or before 1872.31 Another intriguing African American who traveled in Europe in this era was John Matthews. All we know of Matthews, so far, comes from a profile that appeared in Russell’s Magazine early in 1857, written by Harry Hammond, the scion of a grand Charleston family.32 The magazine was a short-lived effort by a group of Charleston men in the intellectual orbit of William Gilmore Simms to encourage literary efforts in the South, and while pro-slavery opinions regularly appeared in it, the journal was more literary than political. It is worth attending to the full text of the piece, which has not yet been discussed by scholars: european correspondence. no. iv.

It was while smoking a cigar in the Buffet at the Bal Masque, of the Grand Opera, that I made the acquaintance of a most singular individual. I was speaking English to a young man, when a tall, lank mulatto, in a loose shirt and troussers, overhearing me, hailed me with “yes, sir—how do you do, sir?” He was passing on, but I cried after him, “Well enough, how do you do?” He turned, saying—“very well, thank you, sir, but I am deuced thirsty, and wish you would stand a drink for

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me.”—“Good! What’ll you have?” “Grog Americain, thank you, sir.” “What’s your name, friend?” “John Matthews, sir, guide and interpreter, always before Meurice’s Hotel, sir, and be very happy, sir, to serve you any way.” But, to be brief, here’s the fellow’s history, which I got partly from himself, and partly from others—and the various accounts agree so perfectly that there must be a good deal of truth in the story. John Matthews, after being engaged as a boy in the Cod fisheries, having been born in Boston, went to New Orleans as the servant of a merchant. Afterwards, he served as under-cook in one of the steamers on the Mississippi, which place he changed for the berth of steward to a steamboat on the Mobile. Thence he went with an American Minister to Quito, where he learned Spanish, and, subsequently, to San Francisco, where, his master having the bad taste to blow out his brains, John took to the mines, filled his pocket with a couple of thousands of gold dust, and returned to New York. Having acquired a taste for traveling, and hearing a good deal about Europe, he determined to visit it. Landed in England, our hero became a pet of the Duchess of Sutherland, and made the acquaintance of the young nobility of her set; but finally found himself reduced to the life of a hay-market sharper. He left London for Paris and got the place of valet at the American legation.—Having mastered French, his reputation as a “diplomate domestique” spread so rapidly, that he was sent for from Russia to install our Minister there. But having the misfortune to be found drunk and creating a disturbance in the streets of St. Petersburg, with Lord D. and some other young nobles, he was put into the lock-up, and thus, losing character, he made his way back to Vienna—attached himself to the legation, learned German and attended the court

balls. He traveled with various masters, as interpreter, over the East, and Italy, and was put into jail at Jerusalem. Afterwards, being in Paris, he gallantly espoused the quarrel of three Americans to whom he was acting as guide, against four gendarmes. He knocked two of them down and was

f ig ur e 120 Photograph of Sallie Mercer, 1860s. Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. Photo: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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given apartments at Clichy for two months.—In this unfortunate condition he was deserted by the Americans, and came near starving. Released from durance, he threw himself on the mercies of our American Peter Parley—Goodrich, sometime Consul at Paris, who gave him bread and employment, and finally sent him to Spain to install Dodge.— Again in Paris, Matthews finds his business poor. He made a raise in the fall by being at a party of Lorettés, who were gambling with some French nobility. The party being broken in upon by the police, John managed to secrete four Napoleons lying loose on the table, in his stocking, and he has lived on them until now. He has kept a diary, which he told me will fill two printed volumes, and promised to show it to me, but I have not seen him recently. The fitting up and publication of this diary would be no mean literary speculation, in these autobiographical days of ours; not, however, that I myself could be tempted to undertake so glorious an enterprise. A number of clarifications are in order. First, of course, it is regrettable that Matthews’s diary never reached publication: if half of what Hammond reports is true, it would have outshone even David Dorr’s remarkable volume in its scope and drama. Matthews, unlike Dorr, was evidently born free, and in the North. His picaresque résumé has echoes of several of the figures considered earlier in this study, including not only Dorr but also Eugène Warburg and Samuel Clemens himself. Like Clemens, Matthews spent time on a Mississippi steamboat, in San Francisco and the California goldfields, and then on a kind of European and Mediterranean tour. Like Warburg, Matthews had lived in New Orleans, London, and Paris, had been patronized by the Duchess of Sutherland, and had ties to the American legation in the French capital. It 214

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may be observed that the lorettes Matthews mentions, young mistresses for hire to bourgeois Parisian men, were most densely concentrated in the neighborhood of the rue des Martyrs, where Warburg’s studio was located.33 Matthews’s Russian, Austrian, Spanish, and South American adventures, however, place him even further afield than Warburg or the young Clemens, and his three imprisonments (in St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, and Paris) suggest that he operated without much of a safety net. The chronology of Matthews’s career can be roughly established. His gains in the California goldfields must have come in 1849 or a bit later. His jailing in Paris must have occurred between 1853 and 1855, as these are the years when Samuel Griswold Goodrich (pen name Peter Parley, author of numerous popular travel books), having finished his consulship there, remained in the city.34 It was Goodrich who found him work again, including the installation of Augustus C. Dodge (previously Democratic senator from Iowa) as minister in Madrid, which took place in February of 1855, soon after the resignation of Warburg’s godfather, Pierre Soulé.35 It is hard to imagine that Matthews and Warburg never met, given their common time in Paris and affiliations with the American legation there. Hammond’s account of Matthews is remarkable in its relative openness to the man’s experience. It names him as a “mulatto” early on but makes no other explicit comment about his racial position. Hammond does strike a note of condescension in the final sentences, and a fundamental racist assumption that a person of mixed race is likely to be a rascal is no doubt embedded in his narrative. But there is also a touch of envy in the recounting of Matthews’s adventures, and Hammond does not make fun of the diplomats whose names he drops. Unlike Maunsell Field, in his account of Warburg, Hammond does not present himself as much of a benefactor to a struggling figure: he buys Matthews a drink and listens to his tale. In that respect,

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Hammond’s piece is more like Twain’s account of his Venetian guide, though Twain concludes his treatment with a serious and straightforward appreciation of the man, whereas Hammond finishes up ironically. In Hammond’s piece, Matthews describes his current employment as “guide and interpreter,” and Hammond says he had mastered Spanish, French, and German. Though the world of art is not mentioned, this description is nevertheless reminiscent of Twain’s guide, who was also noted as fluent in French, Italian, and Spanish. Twain provides no information about how his guide was hired, but given his putative father’s work for a major Venetian hotel, it is likely that he either was recommended by such an establishment or—like Matthews, in front of the Hotel Meurice in Paris— waited just outside for customers. Both men probably fell into the category of valets de place, the freelance guides for hire who were a conspicuous feature of tourism throughout the Continent. Even back in the United States, people of color sometimes served in an analogous capacity: Frederick Church’s 1852 painting of the Natural Bridge (Fralin Museum, University of Virginia, Charlottesville), a famous geological oddity in Virginia celebrated by Jefferson, depicts a white woman being shown around by a male African American guide. David Dorr retrospectively made himself into a guide by writing his travel memoir, A Colored Man Round the World. In that memoir, his interests gravitate more to architecture than to the figurative arts, but one work of sculpture appears to have caught his attention. In Verona Dorr noted that the city’s patron saint, Zeno, “was a black man,” almost certainly because a Romanesque wooden statue of the saint in the great church in Verona dedicated to Zeno has a dark complexion and tightly curled hair (fig. 121).36 Zeno is said to have been born in North Africa, but he is usually depicted with European skin color in other images in Verona and elsewhere in Italy.

f ig ur e 121 Saint Zeno, twelfth century c.e. Polychrome wood. San Zeno Maggiore, Verona. Photo: Peter Schickert / Alamy Stock Photo.

Other artistically knowledgeable persons of color were encountered by white Americans in Italy. In 1847 the New Englander Jane Anthony Eames wrote of her initial discomfiture at being seated opposite a “colored gentleman,” whom she also calls a “descendant of

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Ham,” in the dining room of the Hotel d’Europe in Rome. “He conversed fluently with his party in French, spoke to the waiters in Italian, and I found out, was acquainted with English too, for on a discussion arising between one of our party and an English gentleman in relation to a celebrated picture, I ventured to dissent from him, and to say that it was in a different palace from what he maintained it to be, when my ‘opposite neighbor’ bowing very politely to me said, ‘Madame is right.’” The man’s nationality was unclear; he was traveling with a Greek consul. Eames concludes her anecdote: “I saw nothing in his manners but what were perfectly as they should be, sociable without presumption, polite, but without affectation.”37 This final endorsement of the man’s gentlemanly demeanor calls to mind Twain’s concluding characterization of his guide’s abilities and social status. Eames’s account of this “son of Ham” also prefigures an interesting passage in the work of William Dean Howells. This does not occur in Venetian Life, where in fact no one remotely like Twain’s guide is mentioned. (It is nevertheless hard to imagine, given Venice’s small-town atmosphere and the few Americans who lived there during the Civil War, that Howells was not acquainted with him.) The passage instead appears in Howells’s 1891 novel, An Imperative Duty, in which the American heroine, Rhoda, travels to and eventually settles in Italy. Before Rhoda learns of her drops of “black blood”—she is in fact only one-thirtysecond African American—she makes various unconsciously charged statements about people of color. At one point she even lightly speaks of wanting to have an enslaved page. But at another she gets into a quarrel with some snobbish, upper-class Americans (the Bloomingdales) about the capacities of people of African descent. “They said,” recounts Rhoda, “that the negroes were an inferior race, and they could never associate with the whites because they never could be 216

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intellectually equal with them. I told them about that black English lawyer from Sierra Leone that talked so well at the table d ’hôte in Venice—better than anybody else—but they wouldn’t give way.” Howells gives the reader no clue to what the African lawyer would have spoken about, but the mention of the table d ’hôte (the common dinner table of a European hotel or pensione, a place where “otherness” was frequently encountered by Americans) recalls Eames’s memoir, and the Venetian location is suggestive of Twain’s guide.38 It is also instructive to compare Twain’s reaction to his guide with that of the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt to a pair of African men he observed in 1879 in the National Gallery in London. At first Burckhardt treats them as a pictorial spectacle, one “all black” and the other “coffee brown.” But he then notes their lively discussion of modern paintings and wonders what they would make of Raphael’s work or of a picture by Sebastiano del Piombo with a character Burckhardt thinks of as half black “but more pretentious than the two good gallery-Moors.”39 In the case of Twain’s guide, it is in fact possible to know something of his ideas about Venetian painting. Twain’s reference to “execrable Renaissance daubs” indicates that the guide was evidently a thoroughgoing Ruskinian, and from Twain’s description the objects of the guide’s disapproval were what would now be called baroque or rococo paintings, which Ruskin regarded as part of the late decadence of the Renaissance.40 Though Twain was ambivalent about the value of famous European pictures (he once suggested that “Old Masters” was short for “Old Masturbators”),41 his guide’s words about Titian and Tintoretto stayed with him. A dozen years later, during his second trip to Venice, he recalled that the guide had described Tintoretto’s enormous and chaotic Paradise in the Palazzo Ducale as like an “insurrection in Heaven.”42 The word “insurrection,” most commonly used in Twain’s day with regard to

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slave revolts and the Civil War, may be significant. Twain’s apparent ignorance of the term “Renaissance” is not surprising, since it had only recently come into use in the United States, and many authors who wrote about Europe did not refer to it. As applied to Italy, one of the first American texts to make repeated use of the word was James Jackson Jarves’s Art-Idea of 1864.43 Clemens received perhaps his first real lesson in European art from the guide, but he also learned something else, which was to have a far greater impact on his work and ultimately on American culture. His account of the guide was Twain’s first published expression of admiration for the abilities of African Americans, and the effect of meeting this cultivated and cosmopolitan man was all that could have been hoped for in the writings of African American educators such as Edward Thomas. Twain, of course, did not go on to write about African Americans in his fiction as if they were connoisseurs, but it can be argued that the encounter with this “elevated” man was a shock to his earlier prejudices. The young Clemens had volunteered, early in the Civil War and to little effect, on the Confederate side, and before 1867 his writing shows no sympathy with African Americans.44 Twain’s correspondence reveals that during an early visit to New York City he was taken aback by the African American presence there. But by the time of his efforts to publish Innocents Abroad, evidence of a new approach is apparent. The unusual terms of the European voyage on which he had embarked in 1867 must have exposed him to a broader range of opinion about the capabilities of African Americans. The trip was a novel experiment in a high-end group tour, and of those who first signed on, the greatest number were members of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn.45 The pastor of this progressive Congregationalist church, founded by New Englanders, was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beecher promoted the trip and

hinted—along with General William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War hero—that he might come along.46 (In the end, neither Beecher nor Sherman joined the tour.) Beecher had been, like his sister, one of the stronger white antislavery voices before the war, and many in his congregation must have shared the same opinions and been vocal supporters of Reconstruction. Others from across the country signed on to the voyage; Clemens arranged with his San Francisco newspaper, the Alta California, to join the group as a correspondent. When the group departed on the vessel Quaker City on its cruise to western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Holy Land in the summer of 1867, Clemens was thrown together with an unfamiliar cohort, some of whom he quickly befriended (and others of whom he had considerable distaste for). He remained in contact with several of his Quaker City friends as he began to plan his travel book back in the United States. On January 8, 1868, he wrote to his mother and sister that he had been summoned to dinner in Brooklyn by Henry Ward Beecher himself, who he described as “a brick,” and among the other guests were Harriet Beecher Stowe and several of his friends from the Quaker City.47 In another letter to mother and sister, of January 24, Clemens related that he had met with Beecher again, and the older man had given him much excellent advice about negotiating with his publisher, which Clemens quickly put to successful use.48 He then plunged into the preparation of the book itself, which he handed off to his editor on July 30.49 On the same day he began to write a lengthy New -York Tribune column (published August 4) devoted to the new American treaty with China. Twain—admitting that he had until recently been appalled at the idea of making either “negroes” or “Chinamen” U.S. citizens—endorsed American citizenship for both groups.50 Innocents Abroad, then, was written during a period when Clemens’s ideas about African Americans were in flux, and his respectful

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characterization of his Venetian guide may owe something, both indirectly and directly, to Beecher and his circle, who would certainly have approved of his comments about the guide in the book. Although the passengers of the Quaker City included no African Americans, Clemens in later years endorsed the idea of European travel for American people of color. In 1882–83 he promoted and perhaps helped in a small way to subsidize the Connecticut African American painter Charles Ethan Porter’s period of study in Paris.51 The passage in The Innocents Abroad stands as Twain’s first, if still tentative, critique of American antiblack racism. Tour guides were probably Twain’s most popular target for mockery in this book, and he made a running gag of their obsequious, pompous, ignorant, and larcenous behavior. At first, with the Venice guide’s dismissals of the aesthetic value of the works Twain is attracted to, the passage appears to be headed in the same direction. But its tone quickly shifts. The guide’s pedagogy is accepted, and his learning, refined bearing, and dignity are endorsed—by a writer whose manners, if not his wit, were thought to be awkward by many of his fellow passengers on the Quaker City. There is humor in the guide’s put-down of Twain’s taste, but it is not at the guide’s expense. The passage ends with the blunt acknowledgment that the guide’s decision to remain in Venice rather than return to Reconstruction America is the right one. Though Twain does not expressly articulate it, the passages hints at one of the assumptions behind the antebellum colonization movement—that African Americans can only fully actualize themselves as expatriates. But Twain seems saddened by this state of affairs. In the text of Innocents, Twain is careful to delineate his Venetian guide as a man brought up in a cultured environment (as Clemens himself was not), and mentions slavery only as an attribute of the guide’s parents. 218

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But the sectional heading for this passage, surely composed by the author himself, is given as “A Contraband Guide.” This introduces a distinctive metaphor, one that in this period still held considerable power. As the Civil War began, fugitive slaves in the secessionist states started to make their way toward Union lines, and the practical, ethical, and legal problems of how to treat them immediately became apparent. For more than a year slavery remained legal in the territories of both the secessionist and the border states, but few Union commanders were disposed to return this human property to their legal owners in the Confederacy. General Benjamin Butler solved this problem by proclaiming the escaped slaves the property of rebels and thus liable to seizure by Union forces as contraband (illegal property). Butler’s opportunistic maneuver was soon crafted into a defensible legal system by Francis Lieber, a professor at Columbia College in New York. Lieber, an ambitious German immigrant who had begun his academic career at the University of South Carolina but had never been comfortable with slavery, moved north in 1857. In 1860, perhaps not coincidentally, he had acquired Leutze’s painting Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (see fig. 71), with its African American youth assisting the patriotic white protagonist. Prompted by the challenge of the contraband issue, Leiber spent much of 1861 crafting an elaborate set of “Laws of War,” which remain fundamental to international agreements today.52 “Contrabands” could of course be a burden to the Union, as they required food and shelter, but as laborers they could also offer significant advantage to the troops in the field. The number of such fugitives was large, perhaps around half a million people. The use of the term spread rapidly in 1862 and was increasingly applied to all African American laborers employed by the Union army. Frederick Douglass objected to the term, with its implications that African American fugitives remained “property,” but not all people of color rejected

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it, and the newspapers began to speak of fugitives who were eager and able to make a contribution to the war effort, by supplying intelligence about enemy forces in the areas from which they had fled, as “the intelligent contraband” or “the reliable contraband.”53 Many contrabands were indeed able to serve as extremely well-informed guides in Confederate territory. Even before actual black military units began to be formed in the Union army, after the Emancipation Proclamation, contraband guides demonstrated that African Americans could contribute in a potentially decisive way to the war effort. The term “contraband” quickly spread beyond military usage, and it can be found in nearly every social, cultural, and political stratum in the period, from the abolitionists to the Confederates, and from popular culture and caricature to literary texts and oil paintings. Leutze painted a now-lost image of such fugitives,54 but his fellow German American Theodor Kaufmann’s 1867 picture in this vein (see fig. 96) survives, as does Eastman Johnson’s 1862 Freedom Ride (Brooklyn Museum, New York). Winslow Homer’s Bright Side (fig. 122), painted in 1865 and exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1867, depicts contrabands who have become irregular soldiers.55 In the South and in Northern Democratic newspapers, contrabands were mocked, but in the North generally, they were often pitied and sometimes lionized. African American groups acted to provide support to contrabands; Edward M. Thomas, for example, was an agent of the Contraband Association at the time of his death.56 The abject state of many of these fugitives was often noticed, and perhaps the most famous literary response to contrabands revels in that abjection in a most peculiar way. The July 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly featured a rambling essay entitled “Chiefly About WarMatters,” signed only “by a Peaceable Man.” It recounts the author’s recent trip from the North to Washington

and several parts of Virginia then under Union control. The editors clearly had misgivings about the piece, which shows little enthusiasm for the war and the causes behind it, and it is frequently interrupted by editorial disclaimers. During a visit to Harper’s Ferry, the writer endorses the hanging of John Brown, and the editorial annotation shows a particular disturbance at this. A section on Lincoln was, a footnote indicates, entirely omitted as showing insufficient respect to the president. As many readers probably knew, the essay was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne; of all the major New England intellectuals of the day, he was the most averse to the abolition cause and thus to the prosecution of the war.57 Heading south from Washington, Hawthorne encountered a band of fugitives, and his odd response to them is worth quoting in full: One very pregnant token of a social system thoroughly disturbed was presented by a party of Contrabands, escaping out of the mysterious depths of Secessia: and its strangeness consisted in the leisurely delay with which they trudged forward, as dreading no pursuer, and encountering nobody to turn them back. They were unlike the specimens of their race whom we are accustomed to see at the North, and, in my judgment, were far more agreeable. So rudely were they attired—as if their garb had been thrown on them spontaneously— so picturesquely natural in manners, and wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity (which is quite polished away from the northern black man), that they seemed a kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human, but perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times. I wonder whether I shall excite anybody’s wrath by saying this? It is no great matter. At all events, I felt most kindly towards these poor fugitives, but knew not precisely what to wish on their behalf,

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f ig ur e 122 Winslow Homer, The Bright Side, 1865. Oil on canvas, 32.4 × 43.2 cm. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, 1979.7.56. Photo: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

nor in the least how to help them. For the sake of the manhood that is latent in them, I would not have turned them back; but I should have felt almost as reluctant, on their own account, to hasten them forward to the stranger’s land; and I think my prevalent idea was, that, whoever may be benefitted from the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes, the childhood of whose

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race is now gone forever, and who henceforth must now fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms. On behalf of my own race, I am glad, and can only hope than an inscrutable Providence means good to both parties.58 This passage has been highlighted by several literary historians, who have noted its creepy condescension to

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African Americans (even by the standards of that period) and used it to mark Hawthorne’s hostility to the end of the antebellum order.59 Hawthorne had written a campaign biography of the Democrat Franklin Pierce, who as president refused to press any antislavery policies, out of a fear of secessionist threats from the South. Thanks to the biography, Hawthorne was awarded a consulship in Liverpool in 1853. This initiated a period of seven years abroad: he left the position in 1857 for a long tour of France and Italy, which culminated in the publication of The Marble Faun. Hawthorne’s European years were in this sense enabled by his ideological acquiescence to slavery and form a strange parallel with Eugéne Warburg’s European career, since Warburg’s proceeds from the sale of family slaves enabled his six years abroad (1853–59). Whereas in Hawthorne’s Italian romance the racial blight of blackness is associated with the sculptor Miriam, who is (incorrectly) rumored to be an octoroon, the faun-like character (Donatello) possesses an innocent and savage “otherness” that is closer to stereotypes of Native Americans.60 In the Atlantic piece, Hawthorne consciously recasts this analogy. For my purposes what is especially notable about Hawthorne’s contrabands is that they could never be described as “intelligent” or “reliable” (as such people often were in the contemporary press). They are the very opposite of guides: they move slowly and aimlessly rather than quickly and purposefully, away from and not back into “Secessia,” and they impart no intelligence. They are “primeval,” “not altogether human,” and their manhood is at best “latent”; these words would have been particularly disturbing to African American activists of the period. Yet Hawthorne prefers them to “polished” free blacks in the North, as if the essential nature of the “race” is best expressed by their abject, scarcely human appearance. The brutality of this view is concealed only by a thin veneer of pity (which can lead to no action) and classicizing mystification. Even the passionate and erotic qualities

attributed to the faun-like Donatello in the novel are missing here. Hawthorne’s and Twain’s “contrabands” stand at opposite ends of the spectrum of capability, agency, and sophistication. While Hawthorne was writing his essay, the events of the war and the increased flow of contrabands began to lead Lincoln in a very different direction, to his fateful shift toward supporting an emancipation of Southern slaves. In a curious coincidence, Hawthorne’s Atlantic essay also includes a discussion of Emanuel Leutze, who was then hard at work on his Westward the Course of Empire for the Capitol (see fig. 79). Hawthorne made his acquaintance by visiting the stairwell in which Leutze was laboring on the mural, though at this point it appears that Leutze was still working on transferring his cartoon to the walls.61 Hawthorne’s admiring account gives a general sense of the work, which no doubt appealed to him because it shifted the American present and future away from the war, mythologizing the nation but in a boisterous, upbeat key very different from the author’s. However, it is probable that the black youth leading a mule had not yet been added, as Hawthorne does not mention him. One wonders whether Hawthorne would have liked the mural quite as well had he known of that crucial insertion. One further work may be drawn into this discussion of the cultural meaning of contrabands. The grandest postwar plan for a monument to Abraham Lincoln was for the Freedman’s Memorial, sparked by the small donation of a black freedwoman.62 Harriet Hosmer, the leading figure among the expatriate women sculptors in Rome, worked for many months on her model in late 1865 and 1866. Though Hosmer had once been suspected of being sympathetic to slaveholders, her design here was relatively bold (fig. 123), if not as tightly focused as Martin Delany’s 1865 proposal. At the foot of a central pavilion with Lincoln’s recumbent body, four African American men stood guard. They

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were intended to represent the passage from slavery to freedom: a slave for sale, a slave engaged in agricultural labor, a contraband guide, and a “regular” soldier in full uniform. The commission in charge provisionally selected her plan in January of 1867. For more than a year Hosmer’s project retained its dominant position, only to fall victim to fund-raising shortfalls in 1868.63 This denouement seems like a harbinger of the collapse of Reconstruction.

Indeed, it is startling how rapidly the opinions about the visual articulation of African Americans by culturally “respectable” white Americans shifted as Reconstruction faltered, a trajectory clearly expressed in the writings of William Dean Howells. (Having begun with Howells, it is only fitting that this study should conclude with him.) During the egalitarian enthusiasm of the period just after the close of the war, Howells actually proposed that the most effective and

f ig ur e 123 Harriet Hosmer, photograph of the first design in plaster for Freedman’s Memorial, 1865–66. Watertown Free Public Library, Watertown, Mass. Photo: author.

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“American” of war memorials would be something like an enlarged version of John Quincy Adams Ward’s bold and unsubservient Freedman of 1863 (see fig. 89), which he called (in a May 1866 essay in Atlantic Monthly) “a sublime parable.”64 (Some had already described Ward’s bronze figure as a contraband rather than a freedman.)65 “Let the plastic arts,” wrote Howells, “in proving that they have suffered the change which has come upon races, ethics, and ideas in this new world, interpret for us that simple and direct sense of the beautiful which lies hidden in the letter of use.”66 Yet a decade later, in July 1876 (just before that fall’s presidential election had concluded with deep damage to African American interests), Howells wrote with cruel hostility of a sculpture comparable to Ward’s, the Trieste artist Francesco Pezzicar’s 1873 Emancipation (fig. 124), on display at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.67 As in Ward’s work, Pezzicar’s black hero breaks his shackles, yet Howells decries the figure as “a most offensively Frenchy negro, who has broken his chain, and spreading both his arms and legs abroad is rioting in a declamation of something (I should say) from Victor Hugo; one longs to clap him back into hopeless bondage.”68 The fusing of racial and anti-European animus is worth stressing here, and it may be contrasted with Mark Twain’s emphatic approval of his “contraband guide.” Twain believed that his guide had made the right decision in electing to remain in Venice rather than try his luck in Reconstruction America (a place he had never visited!). In hindsight, the brevity of that social experiment suggests the guide’s choice was, as Twain put it, “correct.” On the other hand, the absence of any further reference to this man after the publication of Twain’s account may indicate that his career as a guide was not long. In Rome in these years Edmonia Lewis persevered but had to overcome many obstacles, and in Florence and Rome the African American physician

f ig ur e 1 2 4 Francesco Pezzicar, Emancipation, 1873. Bronze. Museo Revoltella, Trieste. Photo: Museo Revoltella.

Sarah Parker Remond and her family faced numerous slights from the American and British expatriate communities.69 Like Eugène Warburg before him, Twain’s guide was a pioneer, and his moment in the limelight, like Warburg’s, may have been all too brief. Nevertheless, the recovery of their stories is essential for any comprehensive assessment of the role of art in constructing as well as challenging the norms of black identity in mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic culture and society.

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Notes Several of the volumes (vol. 2, pts. 1 and 2; vol. 3, pts. 1, 2, and 3; vol. 4, pts. 1 and 2) of the new edition of Bindman and Gates, Image of the Black in Western Art, are frequently referenced (especially for images) and are abbreviated below as IBWA 2.1, 2.2, and so on.

int r od uc t ion 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

Weitenkampf, Political Caricature, 141; Reilly, American Political Prints, 540, no. 1864-36; attributed to Joseph Baker, who produced other images hostile to African Americans. See also M. Wood, Horrible Gift, 56–58, 59, fig. 2.13. Korshak, “Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol.” IBWA, 4.1:29–30, fig. 14. In the 1850s the Haitian emperor had altered these arms, but they were restored at his fall, in 1859; “Flags of Haiti,” http://haiti.org/flag-and-coat-of-arms. See chapter 3 below. See “The Negro Before the Savans,” Anglo-African, September 26, 1863, 3, recounting the African American fugitive slave and abolitionist William Craft’s critique of a British version of this claim. See also Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, 208–13. S. Kaplan, “Miscegenation Issue”; Lemire, “Miscegenation.” IBWA, 2.2:28–40. For example, both Sardinia and Corsica used devices with heads of black Africans in the nineteenth century, and continue to do so today. Fois, Lo stemma dei Quattro Mori; Carrington, Granite Island, 201. One exception is the arms of the English slave trader Sir John Hawkins. Hall, Things of Darkness, 19–20, fig. 2. Talbot, Dürer in America, cat. 205. See also Stechow, “Dürer and America,” and Stechow, “Justice Holmes’

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

Notes,” on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1860 essay on Dürer in Harvard Magazine. This heraldic motif had already found its way to North America by ca. 1770. See Bolton and Coe, American Samplers, plate 125, opposite 404, showing the sampler with the arms of Ives, by Rebecca Ives, collection of Mrs. Robert Hale Bancroft. See M. Wood, Horrible Gift; Harvey, Civil War and American Art; and S. Kaplan, “Black Soldier.” S. Kaplan, “Notes on the Exhibition”; “Fifty Years Later: The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting,” http://www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum/exhibitions/2014 /1964-portrayal-revisited.shtml. Twain, Innocents Abroad, 240–42. See, for example, J. A. Rogers, Sex and Race. The 2012 edition has a new introduction, by David Bindman, and two additional essays by other authors (in part 2). P. Kaplan, “‘Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans.’” My contributions are in IBWA, 3.1:93–190 and 3.3:199–206. Buick, Child of the Fire; Nelson, Color of Stone; Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors; Richardson, “Friends and Colleagues” and other earlier essays. Talia Lavin, “The Life and Death of Edmonia Lewis, Spinster and Sculptor,” Toast, http://the-toast.net/2015 /11/02/the-life-and-death-of-edmonia-lewis.

c h ap t er 1 1.

A Bostonian, “Some Account of Venice, and the Splendid Entrance of Buonaparte into that City, in December, 1807,” Monthly Anthology and Boston Review 7 (August 1809): 84, 88; (October 1809): 227–28.

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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P. Kaplan, “Local Color.” “Aethiopes” (Ethiopians, that is, the standard classical term for black Africans) are mentioned among the Venetian multitudes in an influential poem of 1579 by the German humanist Nathan Chytraeus, which was disseminated in England in 1611 by Thomas Coryat (Coryat’s Crudities, 1:313, 315) and later by Hester Lynch Piozzi (Observations and Reflections, 112–13). On the earlier eras, see IBWA, 2.2:9–12; 3.1:93–101, 111–19, 123–32, 134–44; 3.3:202–4. For the Napoleonic period, Scarabello and Gusso, Processo al moro. On the San Marco zone, see P. Kaplan, “Local Color,” 8–11; on the Frari, see below. On American writing about Italy, see H. Smith, American Travellers; Vance, America’s Rome; Praz, “Impressioni italiane”; and Stebbins, Lure of Italy. Woodress, Howells and Italy; Goodman and Dawson, William Dean Howells, 74–99. Knadler, “Strangely Re-abolitionized.” IBWA, 3.1:112, 352; Goy, Building Renaissance Venice, 233–45. Howells, Venetian Life (1867), 289. P. Kaplan, Rise of the Black Magus. Clock designed by Gianpaolo Ranieri of Modena and his son Giancarlo, but it is not clear who carved the wooden sculptures. G. A. Alviero reworked the sculptures in 1755. Peratoner, Orologio della torre, 31. P. Kaplan, “Local Color,” 11–12. See, for example, Fisk, Travels, 371. P. Kaplan, “Bartolomeo Passarotti.” Prince was also commonly a name given to enslaved African Americans. For an effective discussion of the trope of minstrelsy infiltrating other distinct forms of transatlantic representations of people of color, see Meer, Uncle Tom Mania. Howells, oddly, makes scarcely any reference to the so-called mori, mechanical bronze statues of the same early date on the very top of the tower, and calls them only giants, as indeed they were termed at the time of their making. Howells, Venetian Life (1867), 55. These figures depicted wild men, covered in hair and vines, but as the bronze darkened (by 1580), they were

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

nicknamed Moors (mori). See Muraro, “Moors of the Clock Tower.” Kip, Christmas Holydays, 169. These works are not known today. A similar display with a black Magus was later seen at Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Peake, Pen Pictures, 279. Caroline Hyde Butler Laing, Rome diary #2, 68, Butler-Laing papers, New-York Historical Society, New York. P. Kaplan, Rise of the Black Magus, 7–17. Laing, Rome diary #2, 67. Wallace, Woman’s Experiences, 261. Laing, Rome diary #6, 181, July 8, 1870. Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery.” Laing, Rome diary #3, 282–83; IBWA, 2.1:133–37, fig. 112; Cipollone, Mosaico. Laing, Rome diary #3, 112–14, January 20, 1870. [Bruen], Essays, 49. Cooper, Excursions in Italy, 2:220–21. Dewey, Old World, 2:140–41, 144. IBWA, 3.1:167–68; Antonazzi, Palazzo di Propaganda, 29. Norton, Notes of Travel, 34. Dewey, Old World, 2:144, and also 140–41. Kip, Christmas Holydays, 133, and also 169; see a similar comment in Hamilton, Reminiscences, 294. Greenwood, Haps and Mishaps, 209, entry of January 9, 1853. One of the few writers to actually mock the presence of black Africans at the Propaganda was Hans Christian Andersen, in an 1842 travel book. Andersen, Poet’s Bazaar, 101. Readers of the African American press were aware of the impressive performances of people of color at the Propaganda. “Summary,” Anglo-African, February 20, 1864, 3, citing a rave review by the Rome correspondent of the London Times. Gibbes, Memoir of James De Veaux, 112 ( January 1843). See also a comment by Henry Watkins Allen, soon to be the Confederate governor of Louisiana, in Travels of a Sugar Planter, 222. Angelica Singleton Van Buren, journal, 16, January 14, 1855, Columbia, S.C., South Caroliniana Library. IBWA, 2.1:202–3. On early European images of the “black bride,” see IBWA, 2.2:69, fig. 42, 157, 158, fig. 136, 159.

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

Fuller, “These Sad but Glorious Days,” 206. IBWA, 3.1:183–87; A. Hopkins, Baldassare Longhena, 150–57. On black Africans as Ottoman subjects, see P. Kaplan, “Black Turks.” See, for example, Costello, Tour to and from Venice, 345, and Goncourt and Goncourt, Italie d’hier, 29. Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842), 353; (1856), 342. Howells, Venetian Life (1867), 169. Hillard, Six Months in Italy, 1:56. A. Taylor, Young Charles Sumner, 80, 232–33, 278, 299– 300, 311. Hillard, Six Months in Italy, 1:56–57. Benedict, Run Through Europe, 296. On Benedict, see Betts, “Memorial Notice.” For the cotton, see Sherwood, Here and There, 41: “The negroes bearing cotton bales on their woolly heads; over these, in stately repose, lies the marble effigy of the doge who, I suppose, ‘made money in cotton.’” For the coffee, see Raum, Tour Around the World, 198. Twain, Innocents Abroad, 235. Ibid., 236. On Williams (1839–1897), a frequent illustrator of Twain’s subsequent publications, see Schmidt, “Life and Art,” 3–6. Twain was especially pleased with his parodies of old masters. See Amkpa, ReSignifications. An exaggerated reading of the image and Twain’s textual description are found in Beauchamp, “Mark Twain in Venice,” 411; Beauchamp mistakenly claims the statues are not actually in black marble. For a small sampling, see P. Kaplan, “Contraband Guides,” 201 n. 40. Charles Warren Stoddard, “Beautiful Venice,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 1875, 1. Donald Grant Mitchell, American Consul in Venice in 1853–55, imagined Titian in the narrow Venetian streets meeting a “great dame . . . followed by a Nubian slave,” an image drawn from Titian’s influential portrait of the mistress of the Duke of Ferrara with an African page. See Mitchell, Bound Together, 25. See also P. Kaplan, “Titian’s Laura Dianti,” and IBWA, 3.1:108–10, fig. 44.

52.

53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

Howells, Venetian Life (1867), 328. See also the fleeting reference to the house of Othello in Howells’s poem “No Love Lost,” written in 1862. Howells, Poems, 166–98, 185 for the house reference. Dorsoduro 2615; the sculpture, attributed to the workshop of Antonio Rizzo, is believed to have come from an earlier building on the site, owned successively by the Civran and Guoro families. See Lorenzetti, Venice and Its Lagoon, 563. The seventh edition of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1858), 338, cites this figure. See also Rosengarten, Eight Journeys Abroad (recounting an 1870 trip), 54. Thomas Clayton, Rambles and Reflections, 291, speaks of a bust, probably also on this building. For other references to the house, see P. Kaplan, “Contraband Guides,” 201 n. 40. Le Vert, Souvenirs of Travel, 1:233; for Othello’s house, 1:255. “New at the Museum: 17th Century Bust of a Black Man,” Saint Louis Art Museum Newsletter (September–October 1990): 12; McGrath, “Caryatids, Page Boys, and African Fetters,” 9–10. There are two dark-bronze (not marble) busts of Venetian patricians by Tiziano Aspetti in the Ducal Palace today, but neither has African features or, in particular, the “crispy hair” that Le Vert mentions. P. Kaplan, “Earliest Images of Othello.” Edelstein, “Othello in America,” 183–87. Allen, Travels of a Sugar Planter, 158, 166. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Othello and others explicitly refer to his blackness in 1.2, 2.1, and twice in 3.1. A still useful review of arguments about the hero’s skin color can be found in Horace Howard Furness’s excursus, “Othello’s Colour,” in the 1886 variorum edition of Shakespeare’s Othello, 389–96. Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio’s 1565 short story, Shakespeare’s source, is also reprinted in this volume (376–89, with the reference to “blackness” of skin on 381). Howells, Venetian Life (1867), 329. Charlotte Cushman, “Salvini and Rossi,” in the radical magazine Revolution, March 23, 1871, 8. James, “Tommaso Salvini,” reprinted in Henry James: Essays, 355–64, 358–59.

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63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

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However, James is careful to assert a racial superiority elsewhere in this review. Complaining about the strange mix of languages in the performance (Salvini spoke in Italian, the others in English), he says: “I am free to declare that, if he [Salvini] were to appear with a company of Hottentots, I should regret that a happier arrangement might not have been made, but I should go every night to see him.” James, “Tommaso Salvini,” 356. This passage is from an added final chapter on the last year (1864–65) of Howells’s life in Venice, which first appears in the 1872 new and enlarged edition of Venetian Life, 418–19. Galt, Life of Benjamin West, 103–4. Cooper, Excursions in Italy, 2:220–21: “Observing a respectable-looking black man behind me, curious to know who he could be, I took an occasion to render an apology necessary for one of my nation, when I spoke to him in French. He answered me imperfectly; and I tried Italian, but with little better success. Of English he knew nothing; but he threw me into the shade by commencing a conversation in Latin. I was too rusty to do much at this, but I understood enough to discover that he was a Romish priest from Africa—probably connected with the Propaganda.” Willis, Summer Cruise, 103. Urbino, American Woman in Europe, 252–53. Gillespie, Rome, 94. Ibid., 196. Franck, Vagabond Journey, 62. On American claims to racial superiority over Italians, see Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 93–116. Galt, Life of Benjamin West, 103–4; Praz, “Impressioni italiane,” 88. Rudt de Collenberg, “Baptême des musulmans,” 519, 524 (Caribbean slaves), 589 (the cardinal’s brother sponsoring an enslaved black African for baptism in 1710). IBWA, 3.1:183; Preimesberger, “Obeliscus Pamphilius.” William Dean Howells, “Letter from Venice,” Boston Daily Advertiser, July 28, 1863, 2, not included in his Venetian Life. See also P. Kaplan, “Contraband Guides,” 200 n. 32. It seems likely that this music was closer to

77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

the mode of white-dominated minstrelsy than to some authentic version of African American song, but it is hard to say for sure. Le Vert, Souvenirs of Travel, 1:224. Duberman, James Russell Lowell, 186–87, 228–32; Heymann, American Aristocracy, 130–31. Lowell, Letters, 3:91 (October 24, Hotel Danieli, Venice). Cited in O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 1:146. On an earlier fictional evocation of a white American “acting out” as black in Europe, see Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s Attaché, 60–61, discussed in W. Stowe, Going Abroad, 138–39. Howells, Venetian Life (1872), 418–19. Howells, Venetian Life (1867), 90–91. Howells does not make the analogy explicit, but his readers would have understood. Longfellow, Letters, 279, no. 137, September 1, 1828. Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles, 109–29. Ibid., 117–19; William Gilmore Simms’s 1837 essay “The Morals of Slavery” had its widest audience when anthologized in The Pro-slavery Argument; see 265 for his comment regarding the Italian poor. Douglass writes of traveling from Paris to Rome and witnessing “an increase of black hair, black eyes, full lips, and dark complexions.” Douglass, Life and Times, 682, cited by Levine, “Road to Africa,” 232. Howells, Venetian Life (1867), 401. Ibid., 345. Fuller, Memoirs, 2:229. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Italian and American Liberty,” Independent 12, no. 603 ( June 21, 1860): 5, reprinted in Douglass’ Monthly 2 (August 1860): 318. See also Stowe’s similar though briefer comments in an earlier column, “Letter from Mrs. Stowe,” Independent 12, no. 585 (February 16, 1860): 1. Mott, History of American Magazines, 2:367–73. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “A Panoramic Picture,” Independent 12, no. 603 ( June 21, 1860): 1. See Greenwood, Haps and Mishaps, 315, for a comparable link, from some years earlier, between Neapolitan and African American music and dance.

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94.

Douglass, “Meeting in Joy Street Church”: “I believe a Garibaldi would . . . march into these States with a thousand men, and summon to his standard sixty thousand, if necessary, to accomplish the freedom of the slave.” See also Douglass, “Progress of the War,” and the items reprinted in Douglass’ Monthly 4 (November 1862): 738, 749. 95. Douglass, “Prospect in the Future.” 96. Fuller, Memoirs, 2:229. On Fuller’s earlier expressions of interest in abolition, see Antonelli, “‘É questo che fa la mia America,’” 151–52, and Kearns, “Margaret Fuller.” 97. Leland, Memoirs, 136. 98. Transcribed in James, William Wetmore Story, 2:32. 99. Quoted in Dimock, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, 66–67 (May 23), from letters in the Sturgis-Tappan Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. Another letter from Tappan to Emerson in this collection (April 23, 1858) laments that the “young men could not see the galleries here [Rome] last winter, they thought so much of Kansas.” 100. Howe, From the Oak to the Olive, 47. 101. Howells, Italian Journeys, 273. 102. Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 119–20, 122–23; Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles, 116, 123–24; Doyle, Cause of All Nations. 103. Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 93–116.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

c hap t e r 2 1.

2.

On Lewis, see Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 155–57, 166–75; Henderson and Henderson, Indomitable Spirit; Buick, Child of the Fire; Dabakis, “‘Ain’t I a Woman?’”; Hartigan, Sharing Traditions, 85–98; and Nelson, Color of Stone, 159–78. On Warburg as a predecessor of Lewis, see, for example, R. Perry, Selections of Nineteenth-Century Afro-American Art. Among the more useful compilations are Rudolph, Brady, and Greenwald, In Search of Julien Hudson (in which, see 6, 23, and 67), and Mahé and McCaffrey, Encyclopaedia of New Orleans Artists (in which, see 401–2).

12. 13.

14.

On Foy and his trip, see Brady, “Black Artists,” 18; Brady, “Florville Foy”; and Rudolph, Brady, and Greenwald, In Search of Julien Hudson, 12–13, 31–33, 45–50. S. L. Jones, “Keen Sense of the Artistic,” 10–12. Igoe, Duncanson; Ketner, Emergence of the AfricanAmerican Artist. O’Neill, “Fine Arts and Literature,” 74–78. Korn, Early Jews, 179–82, 320–21 nn. 41–44. Primarily Brady, “Black Artists,” and also her “Free Men of Color,” 480–86; but see also her brief notices in “Warburg Brothers” and “Footnote to History.” “Another American Sculptor,” New Orleans Picayune, March 7, 1855, 1; “A Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans,” New Orleans Picayune, December 26, 1857, 1; “A Colored Artist,” Daily Crescent, December 26, 1857, 4; “A Creole Sculptor,” New Orleans Bee, December 13, 1850; “Eugene Warburg,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans, March 9, 1859, 1. “Statuette of ‘Old Tiff,’” Art Journal 19 (September 1857): 295; “A Visit to Mr. Warburg’s Studio,” American 1, no. 8 ( January 27, 1855): 1; and also “Another Visit to Mr. Warburg’s Studio,” American 1, no. 50 (November 10, 1855): 1. Frédéric Gaillardet, “France: Correspondance du Courrier des É.-Unis,” Courrier des États-Unis 9 ( June 1855): 2; untitled, Charleston Daily Courier, February 25, 1858, 1. See below on census and other government material. Desdunes, Nos hommes, 95–98; also a slightly abridged English translation, Desdunes, Our People, 69–71. Desdunes gives the artist’s last name as Warbourg, as do a few more-recent sources. F. B., “Eugène Warburg,” L’Union, December 6, 1862, 3, and December 10, 1862, 1. On Daniel, see Korn, Early Jews, 179–81. Daniel’s and Eugène’s relations to the rest of the Warburgs are clear in the family’s published genealogy of 1837 (Stammund Nachfahrentafeln, sheet 22). Aby Warburg was Eugène’s sixth cousin, once removed. On the Warburg clan, see Chernow, Warburgs. Eugène was also one of the first American sculptors of Jewish ancestry. Despite the biblical prohibition against graven images, around 1860 the Jews of New Orleans

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15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

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and their rabbi were planning to erect a statue of Judah Touro. Ezekiel, Memoirs, 20. Moses Ezekiel (1844–1917) was a Jew, a Virginian, and a Confederate veteran. He spent most of his career in Rome (from 1874) and is best known for several monuments to Confederate generals. On the gradual appearance of Jews in the elite branches of the visual arts, see Gutmann, “Jewish Participation.” Korn, Early Jews, 180–81. Ibid., 181, 321 n. 44; O’Neill, “Fine Arts and Literature,” 74. Korn gives a death date of November 1, 1837, for Marie Rose, but as discussed below, her inheritance was still being divided in 1852, and he finds this puzzling. O’Neill (74 n. 30) notes that our artist was officially named Joseph Eugène, but “Joseph” is only used in legal documents. Desdunes, Our People, 69 (Garbeille appears as “Gabriel”); O’Neill, “Fine Arts and Literature,” 74; Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, s.v. “Garbeille, Philippe.” O’Neill, “Fine Arts and Literature,” 75. Ibid., 74. Warburg’s proposal and a sketch of the simple design are preserved. Samuel Wilson Jr. Collection of St. Louis Cathedral Papers, mss 166, folder 13 (February 12, 1851), The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans. (Note that the letter, about further decoration of the cathedral, mistakenly attributed to Warburg in my “‘Mulatto Sculptor,’” 95 n. 17, is in fact by Jules Lion, a French-born artist from a Jewish family; see Picard, “Racing Jules Lion,” on previous claims that he was a free person of color.) Warburg may have been commissioned to make something for the Hotel Grunewald-Hermann in New Orleans, though this work, if ever produced, is not known today; see Toledano and Christovich, New Orleans Architecture, 6:107. Desdunes, Our People, 69. On Eugène’s brother (1836– 1911) and nephew, see ibid., 70–71; O’Neill, “Fine Arts and Literature,” 77–78; and Brady, “Black Artists,” 24. F. B., “Eugène Warburg,” L'Union, December 6, 1862, 3. Desdunes, Our People, 69. Perhaps “Panniston” signifies a member of the Peniston family, after whom a street in New Orleans is named. F. Peniston, from Louisiana, was noted as staying in Paris in 1856, during Warburg’s later

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

stay in that city. “Americans in Paris,” American 2, no. 79 ( June 23, 1856): 5. O’Neill, “Fine Arts and Literature,” 74–75. Plon, Thorvaldsen, 249–50, 258, 264–65. “Died,” Daily Picayune, October 10, 1891, 3. On Galli, see Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, s.v. “Pietro Galli,” and Campitelli, “Scuola di Thorvaldsen.” Dimmick, “Mythic Proportion,” 171. “Creole Sculptor.” Desdunes, Our People, 70; Brady, “Warburg Brothers,” 8; Brady, “Black Artists,” 22. In the original, 1911 French version of Desdunes’s monograph (Nos hommes, 97), there also appears one sentence omitted from the English translation: “A l’étranger, le genie de Warbourg avait pris un essor.” Brady, “Free Men of Color,” 484. However, Perelli was on good terms with Florville Foy, another mixed-race New Orleans marble worker, and is said to have made a bust of him. See Brady, “Black Artists,” 18. Moore, “Pierre Soulé.” On Séjour, see Sollors, Neither Black nor White, 164–67, and O’Neill, Séjour. In mid-nineteenth-century Paris, of course, the most prominent literary figures of partly African descent were Alexandre Dumas père and fils; Dumas père was the grandson of a mixed-race Haitian woman. Korn, Early Jews, 321 n. 44; O’Neill, “Fine Arts and Literature,” 75. The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2008.0237.1 (in French), New Orleans, translated by the author, as are all subsequent translations unless otherwise indicated. February 4, vessel City of Rotterdam, Dunkirk to London, declaration of aliens, signature, and identification as sculptor; August 21, vessel Fame, Calais to London, signature, and identification as artist. Alien Act 1836, Returns and Papers, pieces 68 and 70, National Archives, Public Record Office, Home Office, United Kingdom. My thanks to Ray Palmer for providing this information. See also the 1999 republication, edited by Malini Johar Schueller.

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36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

Dorr, Colored Man Round the World (1858), 38–40. In this era the term “quadroon” signified a person with one black grandparent; “octoroon,” a person with one black great-grandparent. Dorr calls Cordevoille a quadroon and may have referred to himself with the same word— see the title of his book. On Cordevoille, see Gehman, “Visible Means of Support,” 213. On the broader Parisian population of people of color, see Modèle noir and Murrell, Posing Modernity, 9–10, fig. 2. Exposition universelle, 84. On Jouffroy, see Lami, Dictionnaire, 3:213–18. Parmly, Thoughts in Rhyme, 208. Parmly must have sought out Warburg on the advice of his dentist brother, Levi Spear Parmly (b. 1790), who practiced in New Orleans from 1822 to 1852, when he left for Europe; he died in Versailles in 1859. See Hoolihan, Annotated Catalogue, s.v. “Parmly, Levi Spear.” Also on its front page. R. Hopkins, “Clark Mills”; Savage, Standing Soldiers, 106–7. P. Gates, “Charles Lewis Fleischmann”; “Trial of Count Migeon,” New-York Daily Tribune, November 9, 1857, 3, on the 1857 death of Fleischmann’s son in Paris; “The Grand Dinner Given to Mr Fleischmann,” American 2, no. 53 (December 1, 1855): 1 (with biographical material and a report of a lecture). Fleischmann’s most significant book is Der nordamerikanische Landwirth (1848). Fleischmann may also have learned of Warburg through his friend Donn Piatt, the secretary of the American legation in Paris and acting American envoy for several months in 1854–55. Piatt evidently encouraged Fleischmann to start the American. Miller, Don Piatt, 115, 120; Bridges, Donn Piatt, 33, 207 n. 96. If Fleischmann was not the author of the Warburg piece, Piatt may have been, as he was also a journalist. Bridges, Donn Piatt, 205 n. 63. Though a Democrat, Piatt apparently had antislavery views. On Warburg’s link to the Paris legation, see below. “Personalities of Literati,” American 2, no. 54 (December 8, 1855): 1. The editor of the American from February 1856 was A. Barrera; see material in 2, no. 63 (March 8, 1856): 1; 2, no.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

80 ( July 5, 1856): 3–4; 2, no. 91 (September 20, 1856): 2–4; 2, no. 93 (October 4, 1856): 1–2; and 2, no. 97 (November 1, 1856): 3. Lobstein, “L’Exposition universelle.” Sanchez and Seydoux, Catalogues des salons, 6:84. A French-language paper in New York City, the Courrier des États-Unis, mentions Warburg’s presence at the exposition on June 9, 1855. Gaillardet, “France,” 2. Powell, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, s.v. “Duncan Kirkland McRae,” 189–90. Wagner, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, 76, fig. 52, 77, 146, and also 147, figs. 134–39. Sanchez and Seydoux, Catalogues des salons, 6:630 (fourth supplement, no. 2369). Weddell, Portraiture in the Virginia Historical Society, 131–32, 174; Williams, “Heritage and Preparation.” Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond, mss2 M3814, including a presentation note to Mason, a thank-you note from him, and the subscriber list. Warburg is mentioned in both notes, and Mason calls him a “modest and meritorious artist”; nothing is said of his ethnicity. My thanks to Miles Hall for research assistance with these documents. Étex, Essai d’une revue synthétique, 73–92. Delécluze, Les beaux-arts dans les deux mondes, 319, noting Jouffroy as Warburg’s teacher. Sanchez and Seydoux, Catalogues des salons, 6:83–84; Brumbaugh, “Art of Richard Greenough”; Greenough, Travels, 74–89, including reference to Afro-Europeans (75–76). Horace Greeley, “Europe Revisited, No. vii: The Exposition,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 18, 1855, 6 (signed H. G.). Horace Greeley, “Two Days at Clichy,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 21, 1855, 5. Mason, however, called Greeley (behind his back) a “black abolition son of a bitch.” Bridges, Donn Piatt, 32. Ettinger, Mission to Spain, 100–127, for Soulé’s early career, esp. 103–6; Bell, Revolution, 160–62, 165–66, 175–76; also Mercier, Biographie de Pierre Soulé; “Political Portraits with Pen and Pencil: Pierre Soulé, of Louisiana,”

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58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

232

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United States Magazine and Democratic Review 29 (1851): 270; Dumas, My Memoirs, 227. Soulé edited and wrote for the satirical journal Le Nain, which ran for the first six months of 1825. See 1, no. 1 ( January 25), 7; no. 2 ( January 30), 33; no. 7 (February 25), 113; no. 9 (March 10), 144–47; and no. 18 (April 25), 78–80. Ettinger, Mission to Spain, 121–22, 175–76; this passage was inserted into a letter to Sumner from Stowe’s husband, C. E. Stowe, now Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. On the tension between Soulé’s French republicanism, renewed in 1848, and his pro-slavery views, see Bell, Revolution, 165–66, 171–79, 184–85; and for a brief comment on Warburg, 183. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 293 (December 14, 1852). Brady, “Black Artists,” 22. Moore, “Pierre Soulé,” 205; Ettinger, Mission to Spain, 365–76. Ettinger, Mission to Spain, 365, 368, 376. Desdunes, Our People, 70. Hargrove, Carrier-Belleuse, 38–39, cat. 17, 1863. See also Plon, Thorvaldsen, 269. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women, 122–27; Yorke, Lancaster House. George William Frederick Howard (1802–1864); editions published in London by G. Routledge, 1852–53. George Granville Leveson-Gower (1786–1861). On the Ganymede, commissioned by the duke in 1817 but not delivered until 1829, see Yorke, Lancaster House, 127–28, 130, plate 86; “Visits to Private Galleries. No. xiv. The Collection of His Grace the Duke of Sutherland, K.G., Stafford House, St. James,” Art Union 8 (1846): 238; and Plon, Thorvaldsen, 250. Field, Memories of Many Men, 138–40, and also in an excerpt (Field, “Chapter of Gossip,” 111) in Harper’s Magazine in late 1873. Although Field implies this all took place late in 1855 or early 1856, it must have transpired, for reasons outlined below, in late summer or early fall of 1856. Field’s Memories of Many Men is the primary source on his life. On his dealings with Mason, see 57–64, 75, 99– 100; with Soulé, see 69, 75, 77–86, 95–99; with McRae,

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

see 70. See also his obituary, “Judge Maunsell B. Field,” New York Times, January 25, 1875, 5. In the 1850 U.S. Census, New Orleans, La., Eugène is listed as 24, Catherine as 29, born Germany, and Lorenza as one year old. Eugène and Lorenza, but not Catherine, are listed as “M” (mulatto). Lorenza later married a white man by the name of William McGreevy, and the birthplace of her mother is listed as Hamburg, Germany (whence Daniel Warburg had originally come). New Orleans, La., Birth Records Index, 1790–1899, vol. 61, p. 359; vol. 63, p. 210; vol. 71, p. 23; vol. 74, p. 187; New Orleans, La., Death Records Index, July 24, 1898 (Lorenza Magreevy dead at 48, no race specified); 1880 U.S. Census, New Orleans, La., roll 459, p. 510D, district 23. Catherine is listed as Eugène’s widow in New Orleans city directories of 1871 (628), 1872 (415), and 1874 (769) and simply as Mrs. Catherine Warburg in the 1875 directory (693). (My deep thanks to Ray Palmer for having located this information.) Louise Ernestine Rosbò’s name is given in Eugène’s 1859 death records in Rome, cited in O’Neill, “Fine Arts and Literature,” 76–77 n. 38. On the purported Florentine wife, see below. Desdunes does not mention any spouse. F. B., “Eugène Warburg,” L'Union, December 6, 1862, 3. Pierson, Real Lady Byron. Ibid., 293, 300; H. B. Stowe, Life and Letters, 217–18. Cognard-Black, Narrative in the Professional Age, 63–85. H. B. Stowe, Life and Letters, 195–96. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women, 127. H. B. Stowe, Life and Letters, 216–18. Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 185–93. Desdunes, Our People, 70. F. B., “Eugène Warburg,” L'Union, December 6, 1862, 3. I learned of this work through the efforts of Robert Bain, of Gallery Sunsum in Memphis, Tenn., and Ray Palmer, of Kenner, La., the present owner. The work was included at the last minute in the Worcester Art Museum venue of a touring exhibition of the work of Julien Hudson in 2011–12 but was not reproduced or discussed in the exhibition’s catalogue (Rudolph, Brady,

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82.

83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91.

92.

93. 94. 95. 96.

and Greenwald, In Search of Julien Hudson). As Parian sculptures were usually produced in some quantity, it is likely that the two previously published photographs and brief discussions refer to at least one other surviving example. See Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, 162, fig. 540 (in illustrations following Batkin and Greenwood, “Copeland”), and Copeland, Parian, 93. Copeland mistakenly believes the figure is based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Parian, 93). The Art Journal author makes a related error, describing the child as a “little maiden,” an unconscious assimilation of the figures to Uncle Tom and Little Eva of the earlier Stowe novel. H. B. Stowe, Dred (1856), 1:98 (chap. 8). There are two useful modern editions of Dred: one edited by Judie Newman (1992) and the other by Robert S. Levine (2000). H. B. Stowe, Dred (1856), 1:240. A. Barrera, “Black Washed and White Washed,” American 2, no. 91 (September 20, 1856): 2–4. “Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review 66 (n.s., 10), no. 130 (October 1856): 571–73, esp. 572. See Newman, “Afterlife of Dred,” 216. Copeland, Parian, 93. Ward-Jackson, “A.-E. Carrier-Belleuse,” 146, 148–49; V. Wilkinson, Spode-Copeland-Spode, 74, 84. Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, 65, fig. 84, 129, fig. 480. From Dickens: Copeland, Parian, 137 (S4), 152 (S93), 156 (S104). Tom and Eva: Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, 218, fig. 715 (1862?). Tuckerman, Month in England, 119–27; J. Thomas, Pictorial Victorians, 21–51; Morgan, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; M. Wood, Blind Memory, 143–52; Pugh, Staffordshire Portrait Figures, 30, 50 (plates 14 and 14A), B238 (plate 26, fig. 75), B226–27 (plates 26–30, figs. 75–91), B239–40. Pugh, Staffordshire Portrait Figures, B226 (plate 26, figs 75–76, 78, plate 27, fig. 78[a]), B227 (plate 29, figs. 88–89). See, for example, John Bell’s Abyssinian Slave. Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, 7 (color ill.), 61, no. 450, fig. 126. Bindman, “Uncle Tom,” 124–27, fig. 15. McGarvie, “Eleanor Vere Boyle”; Beaumont, “Biography and Bibliography”; Oxford Dictionary of National Biog-

raphy, s.v. “Boyle, Eleanor Vere Crombie (1825–1916),” 7:75–76 (entry by Charlotte Yeldham); J. Thomas, Pictorial Victorians, 68–76. 97. H. B. Stowe, Dred (1856), 2:84–86. 98. Bindman, “Uncle Tom.” On her Gordon ancestors, see Beaumont, “Eleanor Vere Boyle,” 22. 99. See the delicate rounded lines in Boyle’s Children’s Summer (1853) and Child’s Play (1859). 100. E. V. B., Child’s Play and Gray’s Elegy. 101. H. B. Stowe, Dred (Haarlem, 1857), vol. 2, frontispiece; illustration designed by J. C. d’Arnoud Gerkens (1823–1892). 102. H. B. Stowe, Dred (1859). Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k58362558/f6.image. 103. H. B. Stowe, Dred (1859), 137 and 176. Tiff may also be in the images on 33 and 145. 104. “En vente . . . Dred, par Madame Harriet Beecher Stowe . . . ,” Bibliothèque nationale, Paris; the publisher is Librairie centrale des publications illustrées. 105. Newman, introduction to H. B. Stowe, Dred (1992), 11, 13–14. 106. This unpublished letter (New-York Historical Society, New York) is transcribed in the E. Bruce Kirkham Collection of the letters of Stowe, book 10, at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford. On Durham, a real study is wanting, but see Roscoe, Hardy, and Sullivan, Biographical Dictionary, s.v. “Durham, Joseph,” 388–94; Read, Victorian Sculpture, 65, 209–10, 212; Copeland, Parian, 86, 120–21; Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, figs. 19, 495, 521, 530, 588–89, 612, 701, 799; and his October 28, 1856, letter to Stowe (Berg Collection, #245932B, New York Public Library), in which he invites her to come visit his studio to select a piece—this visit must have been the occasion of their initial discussion about Warburg. Stowe therefore must have seen Warburg between October 28 and November 3. 107. F. B., “Eugène Warburg,” L'Union, December 6, 1862, 3. 108. H. B. Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 450. 109. Stowe’s letter to Lady Byron of October 16 speaks of this planned visit. Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. For Martineau on Webb, see Martineau, Collected Letters, 4:21–22.

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110. 111.

112.

113. 114.

115. 116.

117. 118.

119. 120. 121.

234

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IBWA, 4.1:42–45. IBWA, 4.2:106–11, fig. 71. On a Cordier bust of a black African at the 1855 Salon, see About, Voyage à travers l’Exposition, 248. Lennep, Sculpture belge, 1:68–69, 2:593–95. In 1859 Van Hove produced a matching work, Vengeance, also said to have been inspired by Stowe’s work. IBWA, 4.1:128– 31, figs. 92–94. IBWA, 4.1:62; Louis-Simon Boizot, 233–34, cat. 81. This abolition was revoked by Napoleon in 1802. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 16. But see the 1853 bronze relief of an African American (fig. 75) by Henry Kirke Brown and a marble sculpture of an allegorical figure of Africa by Randolph Rogers, recently acquired by the Bowdoin College Museum, both discussed in chapter 3 below. Looney, Freedom Readers, 18–19. Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 246–48, cats. 80–81 (entry by Martina Droth and Tess Korobkin); Kasson, “Narratives of the Female Body.” With a particular focus on the relationship of the work to American slavery, see Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, 2–3; Hyman, “Greek Slave,” 222–23; Green, “Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave,” 36–39; Yellin, Women and Sisters, 99–124; Savage, Standing Soldiers, 28–31; Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 161–62; Nelson, Color of Stone, 75–78; and Dabakis, review of Nelson, The Color of Stone. Maurer, “‘Punch’ on Slavery.” “A Study from Nature,” Punch 8 ( June 14, 1845): 257. One of the few recent citations of this passage is in Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 246, whose editors note it was widely reprinted in Britain. The Punch piece must have appeared before its listed date of publication, as it was printed, with proper source acknowledgment, in the London Times: “A Study from Nature,” June 12, 1845, 6; this version is briefly mentioned by Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon.” “A Study from Nature,” Living Age 6 (1845): 196; “A Study from Nature,” North Star, December 3, 1847, 3. Cited in Stauffer, Trodd, and Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass, 129. Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, 251, fig. 856.

122.

123. 124.

125.

126.

127. 128. 129.

130. 131.

This would have been the second version of the statue, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 248; Gontar, “‘Robbed of His Treasure.’” “America in Crystal,” Punch 20 (May 24, 1851): 209. Punch 20 ( June 7, 1851): 236. Morris, Artist of Wonderland, 324; Yellin, Women and Sisters, 120–22; Nelson, Color of Stone, 134–36; Culkin, Harriet Hosmer, 59–60; Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 246–47. “British and Foreign Anti-slavery Society,” Anti-slavery Reporter, no. 68 (August 1, 1851): 135, transcribing comments made at a meeting at Exeter Hall by the Reverend Thomas Binney, cited in Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 247. For another analogous British critique, see Chaff, 16: “why did Power sculpture a Greek slave? when he had so many nigger models at home to study from.” Knadler, “At Home in the Crystal Palace,” 332. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World (1858), 20. See chapter 6 below. Letter from William Lloyd Garrison, first published as “Fugitive Slaves at the Great Exhibition,” Liberator, July 18, 1851, 4, and then excerpted at length in Still, Underground Railroad, 374–76. Yellin, Women and Sisters, 122–23; Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, 70– 72; Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 31; Nyong’o, “Hiawatha’s Black Atlantic Itineraries,” 82–84; Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon”; Merrill, “Exhibiting Race,” whose author incorrectly claims (336 n. 39) that people of color appear in the illustrations of crowds at the Crystal Palace in Punch and the Illustrated London News. “Sambo to the ‘Greek Slave,’” Punch 21 (September 6, 1851): 105. Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 251–54, cat. 84 (entry by Michael Hatt); Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun”; Marsh, Black Victorians, 91, with some confusion about the 1862 version; Barnes, John Bell, 49, 137. A Parian version was made but not until 1862. Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 253; Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, 61, no. 377, 112, fig. 375; Barnes, John Bell, 49.

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132.

133.

134.

135.

136. 137. 138. 139.

The plaster version is known from a photograph of its installation at the Crystal Palace (1851); bronze version, Osborne House (Royal Collection), Isle of Wight. Barnes, John Bell, 41–42, 122–23, figs. 22–23; Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 248 n. 11, 253–54. On the relatively few earlier European images in which she is not shown as white, see McGrath, “Black Andromeda.” Barnes, John Bell, 49, 153, plate 53 (but with incorrect dates). “Royal Academy: Sculpture,” Athenaeum, no. 1337 ( June 1853): 709–10: “A Daughter of Eve (1348), by Mr. J. Bell, is clever to the length of being painful. This ‘daughter of Eve’ is an African woman, supposed to be standing on the shore of the Atlantic, manacled for the slave market. The details are not such as lend themselves well to the refinements of sculpture,—and the better the art with which they are represented the greater would be the offence which lowers the art.” Apparently only surviving in Parian, often tinted. Barnes, John Bell, 44–45, 152; Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, 7, 61, 82; Read, “Parian and Sculpture,” 46–47. At Mr. Grundy’s Gallery, on Exchange St. “Local and Provincial,” Manchester Guardian, August 27, 1853, 6, cited in Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun.” The Guardian’s account of the work is similar to Stowe’s somewhat backhanded praise for Warburg’s Tiff: “but though her race is indelibly stamped on her features, the reality is sufficiently idealized to make even those despised characteristics interesting and touching, even in their unloveliness. . . . It was seen and admired by the Duchess of Sutherland, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, and a large party.” H. B. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston, 1852), 2:50, noted by Savage, Standing Soldiers, 15. H. B. Stowe, Dred (1856), 1:240. Ibid., 1:233. On “blackamoor” statues, see Amkpa, ReSignifications. H. B. Stowe, Dred (1856), 1:219. In 1834 the journalist Nathaniel Parker Willis, later the New York employer of the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs, ogled a group of young enslaved black African women at a slave market in Istanbul and wrote that they were “as straight and fine-

limbed as pieces of black statuary.” Willis, “First Impressions, or Notes by the Way,” New-York Mirror, October 4, 1834, 108. 140. Hosmer, Letters and Memories, 136 (Hosmer to Mrs. Carr, November 30, 1858). 141. H. B. Stowe, Life and Letters, 255–56, discussed by Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles, 123. On the Castellani, see Munn, Castellani and Giuliano, 20–25 (on their politics), 40–45, and 120–21, nos. 32, 32a, 32b (earrings with heads of Africans, made in their shop, now in the Museo nazionale etrusco in Rome). 142. IBWA, 3.1:151–55, figs. 76–77; Hall, Things of Darkness, 215–26; Schäffer, Schwarze Schönheit. 143. See her 1860 letter, “Italian and American Liberty.” Already in Stowe’s jewelry box was another object associated with the fight against slavery: a golden chain given her by the Duchess of Sutherland in 1853, with inscriptions on the links recording the metaphorical breaking of the chains of slavery by British legislation. See Joseph H. Twichell, “Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe in Hartford,” Critic 155 (December 18, 1886): 301–2. 144. Several casts of the bronze are known. On the Parian versions (18" and 21"), see Batkin and Atterbury, “Origin and Development,” 14, fig. 13; Atterbury, Parian Phenomenon, 160, fig. 535; and Janson, Catalogues of the Paris Salon, 246, no. 2137. 145. H. B. Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” 473; Painter, Sojourner Truth, 154; Grigsby, Enduring Truths, 40. 146. Charles Eliot Norton to Mrs. Andrews Norton, Rome, March 15, 1857, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 1:163–64. See also Newman in H. B. Stowe, Dred (1992), 21. 147. H. B. Stowe, Dred (1856), 1:219; H. B. Stowe, Dred (1859), 16. 148. H. B. Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” 480– 81. Also quoted in Phillips, Reminiscences, 130–31. 149. Copeland, Parian, 86; Ward-Jackson, “A.-E. CarrierBelleuse.” 150. Ward-Jackson, “A.-E. Carrier-Belleuse,” 146, 149–50; Hargrove, Life and Work, 2. 151. Chauvet, François Arago. 152. His studio was at 13 (now 15) rue de la Tour d’Auvergne. Hargrove, Carrier-Belleuse, 13.

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153.

William J. Wilson, “From Our Brooklyn Correspondent,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 11, 1853, discussed in more detail in chapter 5 below. 154. Vendryes, “Race Identity / Identifying Race,” 91. 155. F. B., “Eugène Warburg,” L'Union, December 6, 1862, 3, alludes to the German trip. 156. Sanford Robinson Gifford Papers, Letters, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., vol. 2, no. 36, p. 173 of typescript transcription, discussed by Stebbins, Lure of Italy, 24, 27 n. 14. 157. On Gifford: Wiess, Poetic Landscape, 80 (comments on Warburg). On Wilde: Stebbins, Lure of Italy, 438. 158. Falk et al., Who Was Who in American Art, s.v. “Perry, Enoch Wood.” 159. Lewis Tappan, letter to the editor, Colored American, April 12, 1838, 3. 160. Dimock, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, 43–69. 161. Sanford Robinson Gifford Papers, vol. 2, no. 36, p. 173 of typescript transcription. 162. “Extract from a Private Letter,” Newark Daily Advertiser, December 16, 1857, 2, reprinted in the Boston Evening Transcript (“Americans in Italy,” December 18, 1857, 2), the Baltimore Sun (“Americans in Italy,” December 19, 1857, 1), Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (untitled, December 26, 1857, 58), and the Alexandria Gazette (untitled, December 28, 1857, 2). 163. Reprinted from the New Orleans Delta, which I have not been able to locate. 164. F. B., “Eugène Warburg,” December 10, 1862, 1. 165. Desdunes, Our People, 70. On Browning, see Stauffer, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (Re)Visions.” 166. IBWA, 3.1:225–34, fig. 120 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). 167. On Guillon Lethière (1760–1832): Foucart, Capy, and Laballe, G. Guillon Lethière. On Cadet (1755–1830): Lothar Sickel, “Francesco Cadet wird sichtbar,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 1, 2018, 3. 168. James, William Wetmore Story, 1. 169. In the first column of the first page: La mort vient de frapper la Louisiane dans un de ses enfants qui promettait d’illustrer son pays. Nous

236

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170. 171. 172. 173.

174. 175. 176.

177. 178. 179.

180. 181. 182.

apprenons la mort de M. Eugène Warburg, de la Nouvelle-Orléans, décédé à Rome le 12 janvier dernier. M. E. Warburg, après avoir étudié la sculpture dans la ville immortelle, était parvenu déjà à un talent remarquable qui laissait espérer un bel avenir. La mort, en l’atteignant au début d’une carrière qui s’ouvrait si brillante devant le jeune artiste, ne lui a pas laissé le temps de compléter son œuvre. Eugène Warburg eut pris incontestablement une place éminente dans la pléiade de ces artistes américains qui s’étudient à ajouter un rayon de plus à l’illustration de leur patrie. C’est une perte pour l’Amérique, un deuil pour la Nouvelle-Orléans, un vide dans les arts. The English-language sister paper of L’Abeille, the Bee, did not carry this obituary. O’Neill, “Fine Arts and Literature,” 77. Simmons, African American Press, 13–15; Toledano and Christovich, New Orleans Architecture, 6:107. See the comments above on Warburg’s “wives.” A photograph believed to be of Warburg’s sister, Élisabeth Eulalie (d. 1920), wife of Louis Gaignard, suggests he might not have been able to do so. See https:// www.geni.com/people/%C3%89lisabeth-Gaignard /6000000012367555670, and Korn, Early Jews, 181. H. B. Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 41–42; Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 53. Both as cited in note 106 above. Originally erected in the Royal Horticultural Society gardens in 1863 but moved to a site just outside the Royal Albert Hall in 1891–93. Roscoe, Hardy, and Sullivan, Biographical Dictionary, 388–89. Copeland, Parian, 86, 120–21. Stevens, “Roman Heyday”; Chandler, William Roscoe, 158. Waring, Masterpieces of Industrial Art, 1, plate 72; “Acquisitions,” Annual Report and Bulletin, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 1 (1970): 17; Stevens, “Roman Heyday,” 229–31. Baker, “Infant Moses”; also Atkinson, “Modern Sculpture,” 324. As discussed above; “Statuette of ‘Old Tiff.’” Pignatti and Pedrocco, Veronese (1995), 2:394–95, cat. 282. There are also examples by Bonifazio de’ Pitati and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

N O T ES T O PAG ES 71 – 80

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183. 184.

185. 186.

187. 188. 189.

190. 191.

192. 193. 194.

195. 196.

197. 198.

199. 200. 201. 202. 203.

Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 185–93; Yorke, Lancaster House, 105. Gardner, “‘Gentleman of Superior Cultivation’”; Webb, Fiction, Essays, Poetry, 1–13; Maillard, “‘Faithfully Drawn.’” Gardner, “‘Gentleman of Superior Cultivation,’” 300. Lapsansky, “Afro-Americana”; Webb, Fiction, Essays, Poetry; Crockett, “Garies”; Otter, Philadelphia Stories, 224–66; Maillard, “‘Faithfuly Drawn’”; Chakkalakal, Novel Bondage, 47–63. Lapsansky, “Afro-Americana”; Maillard, “‘Faithfully Drawn.’” Webb, “Garies,” 41. Recently brought to light by Otter, Philadelphia Stories, 234–36, fig. 4.1. The only copy of the cover I know of is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Noted by Werner Sollors in Webb, Fiction, Essays, Poetry, 2. Review of The Garies and Their Friends, by Frank J. Webb, Sunday Times (London), September 27, 1857, 2, reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, December 4, 1857. See Sollors, Neither Black nor White, 338–48. Belasco, Stowe in Her Own Time, xxi. See especially works by Edward Williams Clay. Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 62–66, 94–100; Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 29. Orcutt, John Rogers, 136, 218. IBWA, 4.1:176; Savage, “John Rogers” (on Rogers’s several small statuary groups with African Americans, including figs. 43, 56, 88, 92). Nogee, “Prigg Case,” 194–95. James, William Wetmore Story, 2:85; Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, 133–34; Tolles, American Sculpture, 87–89, cat. 35. The earliest version of the statue is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Buick, Child of the Fire, 183–86, 199, 202–7. Siedler, “Critical Reappraisal,” 483. Jarves, Art-Idea, 281–82; also Jarves, Art Thoughts, 312. Hale, Ninety Days’ Worth of Europe, 141–48. Tolles, American Sculpture, 90–92, cat. 36.

204. See note 145 above; see also Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, 130–31, and Grigsby, Enduring Truths, 37–42. 205. Charles Sumner Papers, bms Am 1.17 (5), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., cited in Tolles, American Sculpture, 90. 206. Tolles, American Sculpture, 90–92, cat. 36; Siedler, “Critical Reappraisal,” 419, 566–67. 207. James, William Wetmore Story, 2:70–71. 208. Siedler, “Critical Reappraisal,” 521. 209. Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, 134–35. 210. J. Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, 249. 211. Carton, Marble Faun, 109–14. 212. Ibid., 111. 213. Mrs. Hawthorne, Notes in England and Italy, 372, 411, 422–23: “Cosmo II. looks like a negro, with frightful, thick, prominent lips.” 214. Ibid., 423: “and a negro’s head of paragon (a black precious stone) with an immense pearl for headdress, and a tunic of one entire pearl, bordered with rubies! I think he was probably the ancestor of the negro-lipped Medici.” 215. IBWA, 3.1:150; Brackett, “Race and Rulership.” 216. See, for example, the busts of the Medici, by Raffaele Curradi and others, in the “Lorraine Atrium,” at the top of the staircase leading into the Uffizi Galleries. 217. Hosmer’s views on slavery, during the earlier part of her career, were emphatically not progressive. Culkin, Harriet Hosmer, 17–18. For a condescending comment about an American “darkey” (the servant of a Massachusetts man) she had first met in Rome, see Hosmer, Letters and Memories, 164–65 (Lenox, 1860). 218. N. Hawthorne, Marble Faun (1968), 23. 219. This uncertainty about identification also evokes the transatlantic career of Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868), the actress and writer who claimed European, Jewish, and African American ancestry. Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, 1–6. 220. N. Hawthorne, Marble Faun (1968), 123, 126, 128. 221. The novel was dedicated to Shaw and her husband. See Waugh, Unsentimental Reformer, 13–14, 18–20, 23, 26–35, and Karcher, First Woman in the Republic, 504–31, esp. 509.

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222. 223. 224. 225. 226.

227.

Waugh, Unsentimental Reformer, 18–20. Child, Romance of the Republic, 231–32. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 14, 26, 313. For another novel, like Child’s, characterizing Italy as a place of refuge for mixed-race Americans (with a New Orleans connection), see William Dean Howells’s Imperative Duty (1891). Howells, The Shadow of a Dream, and An Imperative Duty, esp. 8, 20–21, 35, 39, 43, 57, 101; Karcher, First Woman in the Republic, 529–30, 734 n. 89. On Tappan and Child: Tappan, Rainbows for Children; Karcher, First Woman in the Republic, 258, 575, 715 n. 98. On Child and Lewis, see Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 156– 57, 171–73; Karcher, First Woman in the Republic, 474–75, 726, nn. 172–73; Buick, Child of the Fire, 12–18, 20, 64, 110.

6. 7. 8.

9.

c hap t e r 3 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

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The fullest source on Leutze remains the typescript of Raymond L. Stehle, “The Life and Works of Emanuel Leutze,” available in 1972 and 1976 versions at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York City (and elsewhere); see also Stehle’s “Emanuel Leutze” (1969–70). Two other important general treatments: Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze (1975); Irre, Emanuel Gottlob Leutze (2016). Two early short accounts of Leutze: Brewster, “Emmanuel Leutze, the Artist” (1868); Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (1867), 333–45. Spassky, American Paintings, 15; “Return of Mr. Leutze,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union 4, no. 6 (September 1851): 95; an August 14, 1845, letter of Leutze’s, with a passage praising Venice’s glorious past, is in the Museum im Prediger, Schwäbisch Gmünd; Irre, Emanuel Gottlob Leutze, 74. While Leutze was away in Italy, the union (Verein Düsseldorfer Künstler für gegenseitigen Unterstützung und Hilfe) had been founded in opposition to a more official academic group. Irre, “Düsseldorfer Malerschule,” 110–12; Schroyen, Bildquellen. Lewis, “Emanuel Leutze’s Westward,” 242. Irre, “Schottische Geschichte,” 132.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

Fitz, “Düsseldorf Academy,” 15, 22; Gaehtgens, “Fictions of Nationhood,” 154. Hutton, Portraits of Patriotism, 18. Columbus Before the Council of Salamanca (1841, Louvre), Landing of Thorfinn Karlsefni in Vineland (1842, location unknown), Columbus Before the Queen (1843, Brooklyn Museum), Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez (1848, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford). See Wierich, “Struggling Through History.” Stehle, “Life and Works” (1972), 24–32; Spassky, American Paintings, 15–24; Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 38, 82–83, cats. 55–56, figs. 21–22. There is also a smaller replica (probably 1851) now in the Manoogian Collection, which Eastman Johnson mostly executed at Leutze’s direction in his Düsseldorf studio. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 83–84, cat. 57, fig. 23; Hills, Genre Painting, 34–40. Hills (36) also discusses a small unfinished copy, now in a Connecticut private collection, probably undertaken by Leutze before the burning of his first large version. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 35, fig. 20; 84, cat. 58. Both smaller versions include the African American character discussed below, though in the latter work this figure (like many others) is only drawn in using a red wash. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 36–41; Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 57. Wierich, Grand Themes; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing. Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution; Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence; Lanning, Defenders of Liberty; Schama, Rough Crossings. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Black Men in the Revolution and the War of 1812,” National Era, July 22, 1847, 1. Nell, Colored Patriots, 198. Egerton, Death or Liberty, 96, and Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, 49–50, both agree with Nell, but without compelling evidence. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 488 n. 2. Lanning, Defenders of Liberty, 13–14, seems uncertain about Whipple. On Cromwell, see Lanning, Defenders of Liberty, 13; Nell, Colored Patriots, 160–62; and Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, 158–59.

N O T ES T O PAG ES 89 – 95

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16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

Graydon, Memoirs of His Own Time, 149; Billias, General John Glover, 69, 212 n. 33; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 22; Wiencek, Imperfect God, 215–17. Fehl, “Thomas Sully’s Washington’s Passage”; Clubbe, Byron, Sully, 92–102. Fehl, “Thomas Sully’s Washington’s Passage,” 584–86. Sully: 372 × 526 cm; Leutze: 379 × 648 cm; Trumbull (Washington, D.C., U.S. Capitol): 366 × 549 cm. Clubbe, Byron, Sully, 100. S. L. Jones, “Keen Sense of the Artistic.” Douglass later traveled to London for study purposes and obtained a letter of recommendation from Sully, confirming their connection. Pennsylvania Freeman 7, no. 31 / whole no. 240 (May 5, 1841): 3. Sully, Passage of the Delaware; both versions are in the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. The broadside that mentions the “black servant” is sm #Am1820 Sully 6658.F. Both quote from the account by General Wilkinson, who does not cite the presence of black troops at the crossing. J. Wilkinson, Memoirs, 128. Fehl, “Thomas Sully’s Washington’s Passage,” 589, affirms that the figure must be Lee, as does Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 488 n. 2; Fitz, American Revolution Remembered, 205, hesitates between Lee and Whipple. For more on Lee, see Washington, Writings, 451; Nell, Colored Patriots, 218; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 3–14 (the best recent treatment); Mazyck, George Washington, 136; Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, 96–111; and Dunbar, Never Caught, 25–27. Hutton, Portraits of Patriotism, 19–20. Clubbe, Byron, Sully, 100. On a frontispiece, based on Sully’s picture, that includes the soldier of color but omits other figures, see Reed, Life of George Washington, and S. L. Jones, “Keen Sense of the Artistic,” 27 n. 59. On Hicks’s work of 1849 in the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va., see Hagood and Harrison, American Art, 46–47, cat. 21. In the 1830s two versions of Hicks’s composition (now Mercer Museum, Doylestown, Pa.) were hung at either end of the covered bridge by then built at the site of the crossing. Kammen, Season of Youth, 82, 303 n. 18.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery; Wiencek, Imperfect God. Cunningham, Image of Thomas Jefferson, cites not one example of a depiction of Jefferson accompanied by an African American. However, a ca. 1802–4 caricature of Jefferson and Sally Hemings as birds constitutes an exception to this rule. Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 12–13, fig. 1. On the Trumbull work of 1780 (first acquired by a Dutch banker, now Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), see IBWA, 4.1:25–27. Trumbull served as an aide-de-camp to Washington in 1775 and thus would have known William Lee. Jaffe, John Trumbull, 23. See also Gikandi, Slavery, 150. On the Le Paon, see IBWA, 4.1:290 n. 62, and S. Kaplan, Black Presence, 33. On the prints made after this picture, especially the fine version made by Noël Le Mire, see Français dans la guerre, 92–93; Henkels, Unequaled Collection, Catalogue 944, pt. 1, 4, cats. 23–26; and Hédou, Noël Le Mire, 80–81, cat. 47. Angela Rosenthal and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz effectively describe this as “nonchalant subjugation” (introduction to Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, 4). For example, Paris Bordone, Portrait of a Man in Armor with Two Pages, ca. 1550 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), on which see IBWA, 3.1:126–27, fig. 55; and Godfrey Kneller, Sir Thomas Lucy and an Enslaved Groom (fig. 51), on which see IBWA, 3.1:258–59, fig. 141. On Le Paon’s Lafayette (Lafayette College, Easton, Pa.), see Dearinger, Lafayette, 14, fig. 7; Hédou, Noël Le Mire, 68–69, cat. 32; and Français dans la guerre, 93–94. Auricchio, Marquis, 117–20. See IBWA, 3.1, figs. 33, 44, 46, 48, 53–54, 57, 59–60, 62, 65, 67, 70, 74, 76, 79, 87, 93, 95, 115, etc. Savage: Dresser, “Edward Savage,” 202–4, cat. 25; Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery, 97–98; Mitnick, Changing Image, 32–37. Paul: Thistlethwaite, Image of George Washington, 132. Henkels, Unequaled Collection, 124, cat. 1085. Neal, Randolph, 2:107. Sprengel, Allgemeines historisches Taschenbuch, after 110, no. 6 (and see also, after 60, no. 1, and after 74, no. 2);

N O T ES T O PAG ES 95 – 102

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39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

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Cresswell, American Revolution, 91–92, cat. 271; Parkinson, Common Cause, 311, fig. 8. Cresswell, American Revolution, 72, cat. 230. The first was a print issued by F. Concena, published August 14, 1801, at 104 Great Saffron Hill, London, for which see New York Public Library, 827[xa], and J. Taylor, America as Art, 14. The second was an 1804 mezzotint published by P. Gally, for which see Henkels, Unequaled Collection, 109, cat. 984. Mazyck, George Washington, 135–37; Furstenberg, Name of the Father, 84–85. Washington, Writings, 451; Mazyck, George Washington, 33–47, 62, 136; Parkinson, Common Cause, 455–56; Wiencek, Imperfect God, 315–16; Dunbar, Never Caught. On Sully’s work (Washington’s Headquarters Museum, Morristown National Historical Park), see Thistlethwaite, Image of George Washington, 132–33, fig. 120, cat. 284. On Stearns, (1) Washington as Farmer, 1851 (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond), see McInnis, “Most Famous Plantation,” 86–89; Wierich, Grand Themes, 77–78, fig. 20; and Thistlethwaite, Image of George Washington, 116, fig. 95, cat. 270; (2) Marriage of George Washington, 1849 (Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown), see Thistlethwaite, Image of George Washington, 40–45, 233; (3) Death of George Washington, 1851 (Dayton Art Institute), see Thistlethwaite, Image of George Washington, 183, fig. 151, cat. 304. McInnis, “Most Famous Plantation,” 92–94; Furstenberg, Name of the Father, 92–101. IBWA, 2.1:81–82, fig. 49. Rosen, “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori”; Ostrow, “Pietro Tacca and His Quattro Mori”; IBWA, 3.1:182–83, figs. 96–97. IBWA, 3.1:95. Ibid., 97; Caddeo, Navigazioni atlantiche, 112, 115, 120, 147. P. Kaplan, “Titian’s Laura Dianti,” no. 1, 13–14; P. Kaplan, “Isabella d’Este,” 134–35. IBWA, 3.1:94–97, figs. 34–36 (including material on other black oarsmen in Carpaccio’s Hunt in the Lagoon, ca. 1490–95, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). P. Kaplan, “Local Color,” 14–16; IBWA, 3.1:92–145.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

Hughes, “Distinguishing Signs,” 39. See note 34 above; also Samuel Jennings, Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, 1792 (Library Company of Philadelphia), and McElroy, Facing History, 8–9. On the Venetian Boating Party, graphite, black ink and wash, gouache and watercolor on paper (New-York Historical Society, New York), see Irre, “Düsseldorfer Malerschule,” 117, and Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 125, cat. 251. On Titian on the Lagoons, see Stehle, “Life and Works” (1972), catalogue section, 113; Irre, “Düsseldorfer Malerschule,” 115–17; and Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 91, cat. 80. On the other Venetian works—Carnival of Venice, Belated Venetian Maskers, Afternoon in Venice, Venice Victorious (probably identical with Frederick Barbarossa Before Pope Alexander III in Venice), Venetian Lady— see Stehle, “Life and Works” (1972), catalogue section, 95, 114–16; Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 113–14; Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 78, 94 (cat. 93–95), 99 (cat. 111); Blanckarts, Düsseldorfer Künstler, 26–27; Christie’s, European Furniture, Paintings, 46–47, cat. 27; Irre, Emanuel Gottlob Leutze, 73–75; and Executor’s Sale of the Effects of the Late E. Leutze, unpaginated. IBWA, 3.3:148, 150, fig. 141. Warren, Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting, 34–35, cat. 10. Carter, Van Horne, and Brownell, Latrobe’s View of America, 132; 244–45, cat. 95; and 260–61, cat. 102 (View of Welch Point and the Mouth of Backcreek). IBWA, 4.1:97–104; Thistlethwaite, Image of George Washington, 89, and Gaehtgens, “Fictions of Nationhood,” 146–82, 173, compare the two pictures but ignore the oarsman. A small version of this copy survives; New-York Historical Society, New York. The full-size copy (untraced) traveled to Washington, Boston, and New Orleans as well. See Athanassoglou-Kallmyer and De Filippis, “American Copy.” McCullough, Greater Journey, 216–17. As recorded by the painter Worthington Whittredge, Autobiography, 22–23. Schama, Rough Crossings.

N O T ES T O PAG ES 102 – 112

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63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

“Washington,” Daily Republic (Washington, D.C.), October 17, 1851, 3; Müller von Königswinter, Düsseldorfer Künstler, 147. “Battery,” “From Our New York Correspondent,” Richmond Whig, November 7, 1851, 2. Nell, Colored Patriots, 198; neither artist is named, but the descriptions of the compositions leave little doubt that Nell was referring to Sully and Leutze. Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 33–46; Fitz, American Revolution Remembered, 178–88. Wesley and Uzelac, William Cooper Nell, 282, no. 186, and 283–85, no. 187; Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 59; Fitz, American Revolution Remembered, 185; Bethel, Roots of African-American Identity, 12. “The Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770,” Liberator, March 12, 1858, 42; M. Wood, Blind Memory, 250–56; Bethel, Roots of African-American Identity, 1–28. “Interesting Facts—Colored Soldiers in the Revolution,” Frederick Douglass’ Monthly 4 (August 1862): 702. Wierich, Grand Themes, 23. Bantel and Hassrick, Forging an American Identity, 11–12, cat. 8; 38–40, cat. 31; 88–92, cat. 61; 133, cat. 94; 181–82, cat. 147; Thistlethwaite, William Tylee Ranney. Bantel and Hassrick, Forging an American Identity, 11–12, cat. 8; Grubar, William Ranney, 25, cat. 6; S. Kaplan, Black Presence, 43, plate 24. The armed agency of the African American character here calls to mind two large works of the 1780s: John Trumbull’s 1786 Battle of Bunker’s Hill (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), with two American soldiers of color, and the American-born John Singleton Copley’s Death of Major Pierson, 1783 (Tate Britain, London), featuring the powerful figure of the Afro-British Pompey, the servant of Pierson, who avenges Pierson’s death at a Franco-British battle in the Channel Islands. IBWA, 4.1:22–24, figs. 8–9, and 24–26, figs. 10–11. Bantel and Hassrick, Forging an American Identity, 88– 92, cat. 61; Thistlethwaite, William Tylee Ranney, 61–65, cat. 9. Ranney’s Pee Dee was soon acquired by William Webb, a naval architect, who also owned a small painted version of Leutze’s Crossing (executed by Eastman John-

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

89.

son, now in the White House). Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 39, fig. 23, 83–84, cat. 57. “Fine Art Gossip,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union 2, no. 7 (October 1849): 25. Bantel and Hassrick, Forging an American Identity, 89. Ibid., 91; Grubar, William Ranney, 38–39, cat. 36; Thistlethwaite, William Tylee Ranney, 63. “Chronicle of Facts and Opinions: American Art and Artists,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union 3, no. 5 (August 1850): 81–84. Bantel and Hassrick, Forging an American Identity, 93, cat. 62. “Chronicle of Facts and Opinions, 81.” Horry and Weems, Life of General Francis Marion, 110– 11, 217–19. Busick, Sober Desire for History, esp. 39, 46–50; S. Smith, “Imagining the Swamp Fox.” Mitnick, “Politics and Paintings”; Fairman, Art and Artists, 164, 169. Fairman, Art and Artists, 163, 229. In 1867 the art critic Henry Tuckerman (Book of the Artists, 458–59) identified the oarsman as Perry’s servant Hannibal, though once again it is uncertain if Hannibal was present or if Powell intended a portrait of him. Stack, “Fashioning of a Frontier Artist,” 9–10; Rigal, “Black Work at the Polling Place.” Stump Speech, County Election, Verdict of the People. Stack, “Fashioning of a Frontier Artist,” 9–10, 25–26 n. 43; Gerteis, “Shaping the Authentic,” 212; Rigal, “Black Work at the Polling Place.” Bingham, Letters, 152–65. He remained firmly antislavery while in Europe; see Bingham, Letters, 186–87 ( June 3, 1857). Bingham to James S. Rollins, November 4, 1856, in Bingham, Letters, 178, and see also 181–82, 186. Bingham to Rollins, January 12, 1855, in Bingham, Letters, 144–45 (and see also 184 for more on his attachment to Leutze in Düsseldorf ). Stack, “Fashioning of a Frontier Artist,” 26 n. 46. Hagood and Harrison, American Art, 72–73, cat. 39; Bloch, Paintings of George Caleb Bingham, 19, 101, cat. 299; Sitt, “Stilprinzip oder trademark,” 79, and also 310–11, cat. 47.

N O T ES T O PAG ES 112 – 118

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90.

October 12, 1857, and July 18, 1858, in Bingham, Letters, 189, 196–97. 91. Luarca-Shoaf et al., Navigating the West, 26, 53, 68, 123– 24; Bloch, Paintings of George Caleb Bingham, 211–12, cat. 301; Gerteis, “Shaping the Authentic,” 212; Chakkalakal, Novel Bondage, 215. 92. Stewart, Ketner, and Miller, Carl Wimar, 25, 39–40, 42, 58–59, 74 n. 87; Bott and Bott, ViceVersa, 240–41, cat. 15. 93. In the form of a crude embroidered version; see Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 279 (chapter 38). 94. See, for example, ibid., 108 (chapter 14). 95. K. Sharp, Bold, Cautious, True, 114–16, cat. 42; Birchfield, Boime, and Hennessey, Thomas Satterwhite Noble. 96. “The Washington Exhibition,” New York Evening Post, March 2, 1853, 2; “New York in May,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser (Stuttgart) 47, no. 2 ( July 3, 1853): 644–45 (African American figure mentioned). Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 79–80, cat. 47; Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 41; Irre, “George-Washington-Zyklus,” 254. 97. Much later, in the 1780s, an older Washington surveyed his own lands west of the Appalachians, accompanied by his enslaved longtime assistant William Lee (Egerton, Death and Liberty, 8), though Leutze is unlikely to have known this. Following Leutze’s idea (though not his composition), Felix Darley in about 1854 issued an engraving of Washington as surveyor with both a black and a white assistant; Thistlethwaite, Image of George Washington, 82, fig. 69, cat. 253. 98. Quick, “Bicentennial Gift”; Irre, “Amerikanische Geschichte,” 239–40. Ellet, Women of the American Revolution, 1:60. 99. Catherine Van Rensselaer Schuyler Cochrane (1781– 1857); Baxter, Godchild of Washington, 395. 100. Gerlach, Proud Patriot, 281–83; Quick, “Bicentennial Gift,” 29. 101. Quick, “Bicentennial Gift,” 33; Bryant, Poems, between 74 and 75. 102. Gerlach, Proud Patriot, 3–4, 526 n. 8. 103. Karl Briullov, Anatole Demidov and His Black Page, 1829 (formerly Christie’s, New York); P. Kaplan, “Karl Briullov,” 265, fig. 164.

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104. “The Fine Arts,” New York Herald, February 7, 1852, 3. 105. “Our Private Collections, no. iv,” Crayon 3 ( January 1856): 186; Baekeland, “Collectors of American Painting”; Callow, “American Art”; Bryant, Letters, 2:261, 287, 291, 300–301, 401, 409. On the Leutze portrait of Leupp, see Baekeland, “Collectors of American Painting,” 164 n. 34; Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 53, reproduced in Catalogue of Portraits, 65, no. 211. 106. L., “Life and Character of the Late Gideon Lee”; Cassedy and Shrott, William Sidney Mount, 65. 107. Leupp, Catalogue of Valuable Paintings and Engravings, esp. 3 (cat. 23), 6 (cat. 51), 8 (cat. 78), 11–12, 18, 23; “The Sale of Works of Art,” New-York Daily Tribune, November 14, 1860, 8; Cummings, Historic Annals, 276–79. In addition to The Power of Music (owned by Lee, though Leupp had an engraving of it) and The Banjo Player (described in the catalogue as a “picture purely American”), Leupp also owned Mount’s Dance of the Haymakers and a print of his Haymakers Nooning, both with African American characters; Cassedy and Shrott, William Sidney Mount, 52–53, 64–67, 72–73; Kelly, “Mount’s Patrons,” 121–22; K. Adams, “Black Image.” 108. Fryd, Art and Empire, 209; Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 59; Meigs, Capitol Builder, 45, 143–44, 146, 444, 481–82, 485, 614, 630. 109. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 61. 110. Lemmey, “Henry Kirke Brown,” 196. 111. Ibid., 8, 88–90, 121–22. The New York Evening Post (“Brown’s Statue of Clinton,” October 12, 1853, 2) disliked the prominence of the African American figure: “There is some reason to criticize this bas-relief in one or two minor points: the negro’s head is a little too large, and his figure, a little exaggerated, and the horse’s neck is too thick.” 112. Lemmey, “Henry Kirke Brown,” 196–99, 386, fig. 4.05; Fryd, Art and Empire, 201–3, fig. 127; Savage, Standing Soldiers, 32, fig. 2.7, 35. 113. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 32–36, 50, figs. 2.10–2.12. 114. Lemmey, “Henry Kirke Brown,” 244–67; Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 195–96, fig. 93.

N O T ES T O PAG ES 119 – 130

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115.

Fryd, Art and Empire, 177, 200–208; Savage, Standing Soldiers, 16. 116. Alexander Lawson after Alexander Rider, View of the Capitol of the United States After the Conflagration in 1814, in Torrey, Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, frontispiece; Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life,” 71, fig. 2 (and another later example, 72, fig. 3), 74 (on the gag rule). 117. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 37–40; Mitnick, “Politics and Paintings,” 14. 118. Now the Senate members’ private dining room; Fryd, Art and Empire, 207–8; Wolanin, Constantino Brumidi, 90–91. 119. Fryd, Art and Empire, 128 (fig. 72), 208; M. Rogers, Randolph Rogers, fig. 24. The Bowdoin College Art Museum has recently acquired a ca. 1850 marble figure (relatively modest in scale) by Rogers of an allegorical figure of Africa as a black African woman. This work is in the exoticizing style of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European images of Africa. 120. IBWA, 2.2:138, fig. 115, and see also 142–45, fig. 125 (Antonio Filarete’s 1445 bronze doors for St. Peter’s in Rome, with depictions of Ethiopian Christians). 121. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 312. See also Hicks, Eulogy, 87–94, with further relevant letters; Wyeth, Rotunda and Dome, 195–96; Gale, Thomas Crawford, 140–56; Crane, White Silence, 374–83; Fryd, Art and Empire, 190, 193, 204–6; Savage, Standing Soldiers, 41; Barbara A. Wolanin, The Statue of Freedom: Bronze by Thomas Crawford, 1857 and Philip Reid and the Statue of Freedom, leaflets available from the Office of the Curator of the Architect of the Capitol, Washington, D.C. 122. Crane, White Silence, 374–75; Fryd, Art and Empire, 184. 123. Crane, White Silence, 439 n. 11. 124. Ibid., 384. 125. Several years earlier, Crawford had been plagued by an analogous dispute—objections to the dark bronze of his planned equestrian statue of George Washington in Richmond as likely to make its subject look like a “blackamoor.” See McInnis, “‘To Strike Terror,’” 131. 126. Wyeth, Rotunda and Dome, 194–95; Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, 3–4, 193–94; Forbes, “Peter Salem’s

Picture,” 88; Savage, Standing Soldiers, 107; Wolanin, Statue of Freedom and Philip Reid. A slightly different version was recounted in W. A. C., “The Statue of Freedom,” New-York Daily Tribune, December 10, 1863, 5, cited in Fryd, Art and Empire, 200. See also “Freedom at the Top,” New-York Daily Tribune, December 4, 1863, 4: “We have placed over the edifice in which our laws are to be enacted the effigy of Freedom. We put it there, with no Slave crouching at the feet of the brave figure, to indicate any deceitful reservation. We have put it there in token of our acknowledgment that, in the sight of Justice, no man is born a Master, and no man born a Slave.” 127. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 107, 236 n. 42. 128. Jarves, Art Thoughts, 313. 129. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 67, 72–73. 130. On this publication, see Mott, History of American Magazines, 2:367–73. 131. Davis, “Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life.” On Johnson’s 1851 Crossing replica, see Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 39 (fig. 23), 83–84, cat. 57; Wierich, Grand Themes, 144; and Hills, Genre Painting, 34–40. While in The Hague in 1853, Johnson had also produced a picture of Uncle Tom and Little Eva (untraced); Carbone, “From Crayon to Brush,” 25–26, 46 n. 74. 132. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 79–109; Justin Turner, “Emanuel Leutze’s Mural”; Lewis, “Emanuel Leutze’s Westward”; Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 60–61, 95–97; Fryd, Art and Empire, 209–13. 133. Justin Turner, “Emanuel Leutze’s Mural,” 10. 134. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 96, cat. 100. On the chronological sequence, see Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 81–82; Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 96; Fairman, Art and Artists, 202; Justin Turner, “Emanuel Leutze’s Mural,” 10. 135. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 69, 108a–b; Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 60–66, 97. 136. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 86; Stehle, “Life and Works” (1972), 115. 137. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 95, cat. 99; Ramer et al., Forging a Nation, 128–29. 138. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1972), 123–24. 139. Lewis, “Emanuel Leutze’s Westward,” 241.

N O T ES T O PAG ES 130 – 133

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140. Patricia Hills (“Picturing Progress,” 119) has noted the significance of the late insertion of the African American figure. She suggests that Simon Cameron, the secretary of war who briefly delayed the commission in 1861, might initially have excluded this feature. Cameron had already left his office in January 1862, months before Leutze’s Smithsonian and Gilcrease compositional sketches were made. 141. “The Picture at the Capitol,” National Intelligencer, June 27, 1862, 1. 142. Lewis, “Emanuel Leutze’s Westward,” 250–51; Irre, “Wandgemälde Westward,” 279. Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but on April 19 the African American pastor James N. Gloucester, writing about the progress in building and decorating the Capitol, mentioned the “costly and elegant paintings, [which] the black man [is] not certainly left out [of ].” Gloucester, “Washington— Alexandria—Colonization,” Weekly Anglo-African, April 19, 1862, 2. 143. “The New Picture for the Capitol at Washington,” New York Evening Post, November 13, 1862, 1; “Leutze’s New Picture at the Capitol,” New York Evening Post, December 17, 1862, 1. 144. “Fine Arts,” New York Evening Post, October 16, 1862, 2, cited in Savage, “John Rogers,” 64–65. 145. Even the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child affirmed this link; see Ryan, Grammar of Good Intentions, 122–23. 146. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 90–92; Justin Turner, “Emanuel Leutze’s Mural,” 12–16. 147. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 337 (and, on the picture as a whole, 336–38). 148. Brewster, “Emanuel Leutze, the Artist,” 536. 149. Noted in the file on the mural in the Office of the Curator of the Architect of the Capitol, Washington, D.C.; my thanks to Barbara Wolanin for bringing this to my attention. 150. Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln. On Hay’s life, see Gale, John Hay; Clymer, John Hay; and Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes. 151. Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, xxiv. On his early years, see Epstein, Lincoln’s Men, 7.

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152. 153. 154.

155. 156.

157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164.

165.

166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171.

172. 173. 174.

Nicolay, With Lincoln in the White House, xii. Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, 15. “Inklings of Idleness,” Washington Sunday Morning Chronicle, April 13, 1862, and May 25, 1862, cited in Hill, Idler, 68 (April 13), 109 (May 25). Clymer, John Hay, 69. Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist, 234–35, 263–65, 273–74, 280. Hay made rather disparaging comments about African Americans in a private letter recounting his quick trip to Yorktown, Virginia, in June 1862. Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes, 57–58. Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist, 307–11. Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, 22–23. Mentioned in a letter from Hay to Nicolay. Hay, Lincoln and the Civil War, 44; Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, 25. Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 308 n. 100. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 89. Letter in the files of the curator of the Architect of the Capitol, Washington, D.C. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 99. Gastineau, Histoire de la souscription; “Forgotten Medal of Gold,” Numismatist 64, no. 7 ( July 1951): 718–21; Emerson, “Medal for Mrs. Lincoln”; IBWA, 4.1:213–15, figs. 156–57; Doyle, Cause of All Nations, 295–97. On Magniadas, see Forrer, Biographical Dictionary, 3:529. “Lincoln l’honnête homme abolit l’esclavage rétablit l’Union sauva la République sans voiler la statue de la liberté.” Hugh Honour, in IBWA, 4.1:213, incorrectly identifies the palm frond as a quill pen. Emerson, “Medal for Mrs. Lincoln,” 196. Clymer, John Hay, 65–91. “Inklings of Idleness,” 75; see also Clymer, John Hay, 67. Clymer, John Hay, 67, 72, 75. Hay, “Banty Tim,” Harper’s Weekly 15, no. 746 (April 15, 1871): 332, reprinted in Hay, Pike County Ballads, 21–24; Clymer, John Hay, 70–71. Clymer, John Hay, 80–83. Ibid., 84. M. D. L., “Leutze’s Great Picture,” Daily National Republican, January 15, 1863, 2. The phrase “purely

N O T ES T O PAG ES 133 – 143

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175. 176. 177.

178.

179. 180.

181.

182. 183.

184. 185.

American” had also been used to describe Mount’s Banjo Player, as discussed in note 107 above; see also Octavia Le Vert’s description of Betsey, an enslaved African American traveling to Venice, discussed in chapter 1 above. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 338. Lewis, “Emanuel Leutze’s Westward,” 251–52. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 93, repeated in “Leutze’s New Picture at the Capitol,” and Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 338. Already in 1859 Leutze may have been considering this title—even before he had decided on particular imagery to accompany it. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1972), 124, and also 116 (use of this title in the Washington, D.C., Daily National Republican [“Local News”] of November 29, 1862), 122; Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 97. On Weir’s sketch (inscribed with this title) of Leutze at work on the mural (collection of Arthur J. Phelan Jr. and Alexandra T. Phelan), see Fahlman, John Ferguson Weir, 34–35. P. Kaplan, Rise of the Black Magus. See, for example, a work by an early eighteenth-century Hudson Valley painter in the Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, N.Y. (Parry, Image of the Indian and the Black Man, 22, fig. 16), and a picture by John Valentine Haidt, from later in the same century, in the Moravian Historical Society in Nazareth, Pa. Two in the Münster, the major local church: a very large picture of 1630 inside the south door and a sixteenth-century work in a retable in an apsidal chapel. The Museum im Prediger in Schwäbisch Gmünd also owns a ca. 1500 local triptych that has an Adoration of the Magi with an African king. Hoopes, Düsseldorf Academy, 43, cat. 120. Preserved as untitled illustrations in the Boston Evening Transcript, December 21, 1935, pt. 4, 1–3. Dimmick, “Catalogue,” 680–86, cat. 127. “Concerning Women,” Woman’s Journal, March 10, 1883, 1; Buick, Child of the Fire, 27. “A Work from a Colored Sculptor,” Baltimore Sun, February 26, 1883, 4. A few weeks later the Baltimore Sun

186. 187.

188.

189. 190. 191.

192. 193.

194. 195.

(“Telegraphic Summary, Etc.,” March 30, 1883, 1) noted that the work had been unveiled, in the chancel of the Chapel of St. Mary on Orchard Street. A surviving photo of the interior before its 1947 destruction by fire has recently been found, but it is too blurry to detect ethnicity. Danielle E. Gaines, “Germantown Art Student Unearths a Bit of Sculptural History,” Montgomery Gazette section of the Washington Post, February 24, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content /article/2011/02/22/AR2011022206736.html. The photo itself can be seen at http://www.edmonialewis.com /adoration_of_the_magi.htm. Berkeley, Works, 4:365–66. The poem was written in 1726 and first published in 1752. W. Jones, Illustrated History, 73–82. The town of Berkeley was named in 1866, though the university did not actually move there until 1873. See “The First Scholarship Fund,” Yale Slavery and Abolition website, http://www.yaleslavery.org/Endowments /e2schol.html. J. Q. Adams, An Oration, 31. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World (1858), 12; on Dorr, see chapters 1–2 above. Cited in Lorang and Weir, “‘Will Not These Days,’” appendix of poems, no. 39; see also Elizabeth Lorang and R. J. Weir, “The Slave to His Star,” New York Times, September 27, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com /2013/09/27/the-slave-to-his-star. Roosevelt, Diaries of Boyhood, 136–37. “Im engen Kreis verengert sich der Sinn, / Es wächst der Mensch mit seinen größern Zwecken” (Thus in a narrow sphere the mind contracts, / But man grows great along with greater goals). Schiller, Wallenstein, 9. The following stanza (9–10) affirms the “battle for dominion and for freedom” as “the great objectives of mankind,” which art must seek to show. Bryant, Poems, 314–15, 375. Sewall, New Epilogue to Cato; also in Sewall’s Miscellaneous Poems, 107–10. See also Litto, “Addison’s Cato,” 446–47. Note that Leutze makes the continent “ours”; in Sewall’s text it is “Yours.” Sewall was the grandnephew

N O T ES T O PAG ES 143 – 148

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196. 197. 198. 199. 200.

201.

202. 203. 204. 205. 206.

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of Samuel Sewall, author of the most famous antislavery tract in colonial America. Duyckinck and Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 1:286–87; Living Age, 3rd ser., 15 (1861): 156. Brewster, “Emanuel Leutze, the Artist,” 536. See note 119 above. H. B. Stowe, “Sojourner Truth,” 481; see chapter 2 above. Jarves, Art-Idea, 225–26; Savage, “Molding Emancipation,” 27; L. Sharp, John Quincy Adams Ward, 41–42, 153–56, cat. 21; K. Sharp, Bold, Cautious, True, 111–14; Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 581–82. “Art in the Capitol,” National Intelligencer, February 23, 1867, 2. Rossiter and Mignot’s picture also includes, in the background on the Potomac, “Mr. Digge’s stylish establishment [a European-style barge] being rowed by six negroes, and conspicuous for its aquatic state and ostentation.” Rossiter, “Mount Vernon, Past and Present,” 245. These oarsmen may be a parodic echo of the African American figure in Leutze’s Crossing. See also Rossiter, Description of the Picture, 5; McInnis, “Most Famous Plantation,” 104; Wierich, Grand Themes, 78; and Thistlethwaite, Image of George Washington, 139–42, fig. 127, cat. 288. On the Noble painting, see Birchfield, “Artistic Career,” 6–7, Boime, “Burgoo and Bourgeois,” 38–41, and Birchfield, Boime, and Hennessey, Thomas Satterwhite Noble, 64–66. On the Buchser painting, see “The Blacklegs,” Daily Morning Chronicle (Washington, D.C.), August 7, 1866, 2; Eiland, Frank Buchser, 90; Byrd, “American Images for Circulation,” 46; and Hollenstein and Chu, Frank Buchser, 39, 149, 151–52, cat. 9.1. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 43; Harrington, “Emanuel Leutze’s Portrait.” Marvel, Burnside, 78, 90–91, 153, 247–48, 268, 347–48. Guild, History of Brown University, 291–92; Greene, “Some Observations.” Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 137, 141. “Leutze at Home,” New York Evening Post, August 11, 1863, 2; Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 335. There was a long tradition of using and depicting people of color as waiters both in Europe and America; for Europe, see figures 107–10 below.

207. Schroyen, Bildquellen, 369, 393, 481. 208. Irwin, May, and Hotchkiss, History of the Union League Club, 20–21. 209. Ibid., 31; “Fifth Avenue and the Five Points—Practical Movements Toward Miscegenation.” New York Herald, March 9, 1864, 4. 210. Report of the Committee on Volunteering, 21; O’Rielly, First Organization, 13–19. Leutze’s role as designer was first announced in “Local Intelligence,” New York Times, February 6, 1864, 5. See also “New York Redeemed,” Anglo-African, March 12, 1864, 2. 211. Harvey, Civil War and American Art, 203, fig. 109, 204–5, cat. 68. 212. “Ovation to Black Troops,” New York Times, March 6, 1864, 8. On the banners of the Twenty-Sixth, see O’Rielly, First Organization, 20–21, and Report of the Committee on Volunteering, 29–30. The flag of the Twenty-Sixth is in the New York State Military Museum, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; http://dmna.ny.gov/historic/btlflags /infantry/26thUSCTNational2005.0076.htm. 213. “Ovation to Black Troops”; Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), 142. 214. Bowser’s flags (for Pennsylvania and Rhode Island units) are lost, but his photographs of most of them (and one preparatory design) survive, in the Library of Congress and in the Rooks Collection at Kuhn Library, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Gwen Spicer, “Flags of the United States Colored Troops,” Inside the Conservator’s Studio, June 14, 2014, http://insidetheconservatorsstudio .blogspot.com/2014/06/flags-of-united-states-coloredtroops.html; S. L. Jones, “Keen Sense of the Artistic,” 16–22; “Presentation of a Regimental Flag,” AngloAfrican, September 12, 1863, 2–3; “A Handsome Photograph,” Anglo-African, October 10, 1863, 3; “Personal,” Anglo-African, October 24, 1863, 3; “Flag Presentation,” Anglo-African, November 28, 1863, 3; “Exhibition of a Flag for the 14th Regiment Rhode Island Heavy Artillery,” Anglo-African, January 2, 1864, 2; and “From Philadelphia,” Anglo-African, May 6, 1865, 2. 215. K. Sharp, Bold, Cautious, True, 138–40, cat. 31; “Fine Arts,” New York Evening Post, February 25, 1864, 2.

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216. “Pictures at the Century Club,” New York Evening Post, February 7, 1865, 1. 217. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 112. 218. Conrads, “Stories of War,” 89; Hoffmann, Theodor Kaufmann, 53, cat. 33. 219. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 58–59; Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 120, cat. 228; Wierich, Grand Themes, 149–50. 220. Henderson and Henderson, Indomitable Spirit, 247–48. 221. Lanman, Biographical Annals, 178; Lincoln, Collected Works, 5:136–37; Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, 21. Haight’s support for Lincoln is confirmed in two pieces in the New York Times: “Congressional Nominations,” October 28, 1862, 2, and “Moneyed Men of the City Declare for Lincoln,” November 5, 1864, 1. 222. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 59. My thanks to Kent Book at the Union League Club for confirming that Haight joined the club only in 1866. 223. “Fine Arts,” New York Evening Post, May 29, 1865, 2. 224. “Attractive Sale of Pictures,” New York Times, May 20, 1870, 5. 225. Fryd, “Two Sculptures for the Capitol,” 17–24. 226. Douglass, “Lincoln and the Colored Troops,” 322–23. 227. Executor’s Sale of the Effects of the Late E. Leutze, no. 4 (unpaginated); Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 12; Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 62; Irre, “Schwäbische Heimat,” 111; Fitz, American Revolution Remembered, 207. 228. Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 12; “Emanuel Leutze” (obituary), New York Times, July 21, 1868, 2: “He has been recently engaged in executing paintings in fresco upon the panels of the Chambers of the two Houses of Congress and through other parts of the Capitol”; “Sale of Mr. Leutze’s Pictures, &c.,” New York Times, March 6, 1869, 5: “‘Emancipation,’ a cartoon intended for the Capitol at Washington, sold for $55”; Blanckarts, Düsseldorfer Künstler, 27, indicating the work was planned for “the assembly hall of the Senate in the Capitol at Washington.” See also “Washington,” NewYork Daily Tribune, July 20, 1869. 229. “Theater, Musik und Kunst,” New Yorker Staats-Zeitung,

March 7, 1869, 4, my translation; Stehle, “Life and Works” (1976), catalogue section, 12, provides a brief summary. My thanks to Heidrun Irre for help with transcription and translation. 230. A second version of Ball’s sculpture stands in Park Square, Boston; Savage, Standing Soldiers, 114–15. 231. Ostini, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 118–20. 232. Curiously, the progressive journalist Anne Brewster’s 1868 piece on Leutze (“Emanuel Leutze, the Artist”) makes no reference to the Emancipation composition. But Brewster does mention an African American boy who was the artist’s servant; perhaps he was also a model.

c h ap t er 4 1.

2.

3.

Charles Eliot Norton to Charles Herbert Moore, February 7, 1907, Norton-Moore Correspondence, 1907.2, Fogg Archives, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass. Charles Eliot Norton to W. E. B. Du Bois, February 13, 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass. (microfilm version, Sanford, N.C.: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1981, reel 2, doc. 785). Du Bois to Norton, February 18, 1905, Charles Eliot Norton Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Correspondence, no. 1824, mentioned by Du Bois in his Dusk of Dawn, 19, 34. On Ruskin’s work: Pope, Catalogue of Ruskin Exhibition, 5, no. 45; Ruskin, Works (1912), 38:303, no. 2085; Weinberg, Drawings of John Ruskin, 9, 24, no. 37. On the Veronese picture: Bava, Il Veronese e i Bassano, 16, 18, 60–62; Pignatti and Pedrocco, Veronese: Catalogo completo, 285, cat. 213; Pignatti and Pedrocco, Veronese, 2:439, cat. 33; Gabrielli, Galleria Sabauda, 88, cat. 572; Santerini, Galleria Sabauda, 328–29, cat. 572. Gabrielli and Santerini, as well as other scholars writing before 1976, attribute the work to Paolo Veronese’s brother Benedetto Caliari, but Richard Cocke, in a book review of Terisio Pignatti’s 1976 Veronese (Venice: Alfieri) for Burlington Magazine, argues that Paolo himself was its primary creator, a view generally accepted in more recent publications.

N O T ES T O PAG ES 156 – 166

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4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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See note 1 above on the letter. The Ruskin quotation is from Praeterita, published serially in 1886–89 and reprinted in Ruskin, Works (1908), 35:497. Ruskin, Modern Painters, 376–78; M. Wood, Blind Memory, 41–42, 56; Boime, “Turner’s Slave Ship.” See M. Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography, 347– 97, esp. 347–49, 379–81. Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton; James Turner, Liberal Education; Dowling, Charles Eliot Norton. Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, 1:5–6; Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 1:140; Ruskin and Norton, Correspondence, 21; James Turner, Liberal Education, 127. Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton, 47–49. Likewise, the young Norton (in 1855) believed Italians were not yet ready to govern themselves and compared them to American slaves. Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles, 115. Ruskin, Works (1908), 35:520; Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, 1:5–6; Ruskin and Norton, Correspondence, 21–22; Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 145–46, and see 448 and 450, quoting from pt. 3, secs. 2 and 3, of Ruskin’s Praeterita. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 1:163–64. Ruskin, Praeterita, 335–36; Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 450. See also Gerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 113. Cavina, John Ruskin, 192, cat. 112. Ruskin, Works (1905), 16:xxxvii–xxxix ( July 19, 23, 30; August 9). See also comments about the painting in Ruskin’s new, 1860 edition of Modern Painters, reprinted in Ruskin, Works (1885), 5:224–25. Bindman, Ape to Apollo, 201–21; IBWA, 4.2:18–24. Ruskin, Works (1908), 35:497. Moschini Marconi, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, 64–65, cat. 108; on the other artists, see IBWA, 3.1:93–101, 107–17, 123–32. IBWA, 2.1, figs. 102–3, and 2:2, figs. 12, 25, 42, 45; P. Kaplan, Rise of the Black Magus, 40–42, 71–72. IBWA, 3.1:134–44, 147–48. For a partial list, see IBWA, 3.1:356 n. 154. Yorke, Lancaster House, 80–81, plate 59 (an 1846 copy of Veronese’s Martyrdom of Saint George, by Giuseppe

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

Gallo Lorenzi), 122, plate 79 (Christ at Emmaus, now in Rotterdam). See, for example, IBWA, 3.3, figs. 97–100. Roach, “Images as Evidence?,” 53–54. Sloan, Rambles in Italy, 179. James, Wings of the Dove, 2:225. James, William Wetmore Story, 2:120. Ruskin, Works (1909), 36:293 (October 24, 1858). Ruskin, Praeterita, in Works (1908), 35:496; Ruskin and Norton, Correspondence, 22–23, 46–47; Hewison, “John Ruskin and the Argument,” 43–44; Rosand, “Il Veronese di Ruskin,” 24; Cocke, Paolo Veronese, 68. Cocke, Paolo Veronese, 67–68; Gabrielli, Galleria Sabauda, 88; Coutts, “Veronese’s Paintings.” See note 1 above. On Douglass, see Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 1:251. On Norton’s radicalization, see Ruskin and Norton, Correspondence, 65, and Dowling, Charles Eliot Norton, 37–67. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 1:256–57. Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, 1:134–37; Ruskin and Norton, Correspondence, 75–76. Howells, Venetian Life (1866), 289; see chapter 1 above. In Ruskin’s letter the original formulation was “green turban,” with turban then crossed out and replaced with “jacket.” Charles Eliot Norton Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Correspondence, no. 5921. Ruskin, “Essays on Political Economy,” esp. 450–52, reprinted in Ruskin, Munera Pulveris, 139–43. Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, letter 4 (April 1, 1871), reprinted in Ruskin, Works (1885), 10:66; M. Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography, 346. See note 14 above. Walker, “From Private Sermon to Public Masterpiece.” On this theme, see Malamud, African Americans and the Classics, 132-37. The painting has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin Reinhart, an American who worked for Prioleau in these years, but in style the work rather suggests some more accomplished English artist. See Hussey, Cruisers, Cotton, and Confederates, 123–29. My thanks to Don Doyle for calling my attention to this work. Judge Samuel Prioleau (1784–1839), Charles’s fa-

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40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

ther (and the owner of a man who betrayed Denmark Vesey’s plan for a slave revolt in 1822), traveled to Europe earlier in the nineteenth century with an enslaved body servant named Forrest. Powers, Black Charlestonians, 17; Hussey, Cruisers, Cotton, and Confederates, 128. Ruskin to Norton: Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, 2:48–9 ( January 28, 1872); to Johnson: John Taylor Johnson Collection, 1, cited in Walker, “From Private Sermon to Public Masterpiece,” 5. James Turner, Liberal Education, 361. Ruskin, Praeterita, 335–36; Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2:450. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2:210–11. Ibid., 2:450. The most offensive phrases are removed in an eightieth-birthday piece celebrating Norton in the Boston Globe: “Charles Eliot Norton, Aged 80, the Scholar of Shady Hill,” Boston Globe, November 17, 1907, SM12. Charles Eliot Norton Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Correspondence, nos. 7874–78 (1898–1908). James Turner, Liberal Education, 400–401. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 1:137–38; James Turner, Liberal Education, 401, 408.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

c hap t e r 5 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

Savage, Standing Soldiers, 32. Karcher, First Woman of the Republic, 474–75. Only six issues appeared. Bullock, Afro-American Periodical Press, 24. Norton’s name appears in the last four issues. Norton, “Moral Unity of the Human Race” (a talk given the previous year in Springfield, Mass.), in the January 1864 issue of the Students’ Repository, and two letters, “Classical Studies” and “Wandering Jew,” in the October 1864 issue. Frederick Douglass, “Prejudice Against Color,” North Star, May 5, 1848, 1; Foner, Life and Writings, 75–78. On African Americans' attachment to the study of ancient culture, see Malamud, African Americans and the Classics. See also the painting by Falconetto in IBWA, 3.1, fig. 41, and Goesch, Diana Ephesia.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

On Thomas Crawford’s Washington in Richmond (1850), see chapter 3 above; on David d’Angers’s Jefferson (1834), at the White House and later the Capitol rotunda, see “Legislature of Virginia,” Richmond Whig, February 6, 1850, 2. Crawford’s work was attacked when still a proposal, before its actual execution. Roscoe, Hardy, and Sullivan, Biographical Dictionary, s.v. “Marshall, William Calder,” 814–21. “A Study from Nature,” Punch 8 ( June 14, 1845): 257; see note 118 to chapter 2 above. Bullock, Afro-American Periodical Press, 61–62; Ernest, Liberation Historiography, 313–14, 321–29; Lorang and Weir, “‘Will Not These Days’”; Peterson, Black Gotham, 165, 172–74, 217–18, 275; Wellman, Brooklyn’s Promised Land, 65, 68, 74, 79, 101–2, 126. W. Wilson, “Afric-American Picture Gallery”; I. Wilson, Specters of Democracy, 145–68. William J. Wilson, “From Our Brooklyn Correspondent,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 11, 1853, 3. Ibid., cited in I. Wilson, Specters of Democracy, 147. Also entitled “From Our Brooklyn Correspondent.” Willis, Health Trip to the Tropics, 55–56, and related comments on 43–45, 57, 65. Willis had made an analogous comment describing his visit to an Istanbul slave market in 1834, where he saw a “dozen Nubian damzels, flat-nosed and curly-headed, but as straight and fine-limbed as pieces of black statuary.” Willis, “First Impressions” (cited in note 139 to chapter 2). These reifications of the black body provide another sort of context for Willis’s complex role, from 1845 on, in the life of the fugitive slave and pioneering writer Harriet Jacobs; see Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, 70, 109, 140. Wilson, “From Our Brooklyn Correspondent,” March 25, 1853, 3. Smith, “From Our New York Correspondent,” cited in I. Wilson, Specters of Democracy, 145. See chapter 2 above. Webb, Garies, 91. Douglass, “Prospect in the Future,” 306. F. B., “Eugène Warburg,” discussed in chapter 2 above. Delivered on December 9, 1862; the seven-page pamphlet, which lacks indication of place or publisher, is

N O T ES T O PAG ES 178 – 187

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249

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23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

250

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reprinted in Newman, Rael, and Lapsansky, Pamphlets of Protest, 308–10. Blackett, Thomas Morris Chester. Newman, Rael, and Lapsansky, Pamphlets of Protest, 308–10. On Nell’s petition, see chapter 3 above. Ofari, Let Your Motto Be Resistance; Pasternak, “Rise Now and Fly to Arms.” Garnet had traveled in Europe and spent three years in England (1850–53). Quarles, “Ministers Without Portfolio,” 33. J. C. Waters, “Frederick Douglass in Washington,” Anglo-African, September 3, 1864, 1. “Emancipation Jubilee at Weeksville, L.I.,” Weekly Anglo-African, February 14, 1863, 2. Already in his famous speech of 1843 (“Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”) Garnet had rhetorically deployed the concept of a monument to Vesey: “Many a brave hero fell, but history, faithful to her high trust, will transcribe his [Vesey’s] name on the same monument with Moses, Hampden, Tell, Bruce and Wallace, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Lafayette and Washington.” Garnet, Walker’s Appeal, 95, cited in Ofari, Let Your Motto Be Resistance, 151. Garnet, Memorial Discourse, 87, 89; Wilson’s observation is part of Smith’s introduction, 67. For material on the history of Union Bethel A. M. E. Church, see Simms Family Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Collection, Howard University, Washington, D.C., box 89-81, folder on “Biographical Sketches of Members,” “Edward M. Thomas,” and box 89-82, “History of the Bethel Literary and Historical Assn”; Severson, History of Felix Lodge, 20; Masur, “African American Delegation”; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 5:141–42 n. 2; and McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 149–65, on the later phase of the society. Box, “Our Washington Letter,” Anglo-African, November 24, 1860, 1–2. Reliable information on Chaplin is scarce, but see J. Cromwell, “Art Gallery and Museum”; Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 111; and an online entry by Nancy S. Shedd, “John G. Chaplin.” See also Porter, Modern Negro Art, 32; S. L. Jones, “Keen Sense of the Artistic,” 23; and a miscellany of images at

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

http://www.genealogy.com/ftm/r/o/b/Charles-R -Robinson/PHOTO/0018photo.html. Chester, Negro Self-Respect, 308–9 (the name given is Chapman rather than Chaplin). On the Geffrard, see Shedd, “John G. Chaplin”; on Nubian and Emancipation, J. Cromwell, “Art Gallery and Museum”; on Hannibal, Edward M. Thomas, “A Picture by a Colored Artist,” Weekly Anglo-African, April 12, 1862, 2. These works are untraced. Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 123. E. Thomas, “Picture by a Colored Artist”: “The Adoration of the Wise Men of the East is the chosen subject. . . . The artist’s ability in the management of the clare-obscure is wonderful, while the flesh coloring is entrancing.” J. Cromwell, “Art Gallery and Museum” (Lear, MacBeth, and Mephistopheles from Faust); Box, “Our Washington Letter” (Faliero). Jonker, “‘Crowned, and Discrowned and Decapitated.’” A key character, Galieno, is a descendant of Faliero: Séjour, Noces vénitiennes (1855), which appeared in English in 1859. J. Cromwell, “Art Gallery and Museum”: “Chaplin is a graduate of one of the most celebrated art schools of Germany.” Box, “Our Washington Letter”; Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 121; S. L. Jones, “Keen Sense of the Artistic,” 22; Bruce, “New Testament,” 109–10, 115–16 n. 6; Seraile, Fire in His Heart. Earlier versions of “The Unknown Painter” are found in Chambers’ Journal (Edinburgh) 7, no. 335 ( June 30, 1838): 17, and in Rose of the Valley 1 (1839): 94–96, and it continued to circulate after the Civil War: Kruma, “The Slave Artist,” Independent, February 29, 1866, 1. Valdivieso, Pintura barroca sevillana, 362, 416–20; Fikes, “Juan de Pareja and Sebastian Gomez,” 53–54. Edward M. Thomas, “Anglo-African Exhibition of Industry and Art,” Weekly Anglo-African, February 8, 1862, 1. Vasari, Lives, 2:649. For the Browning poem, see Prometheus Bound, 170–72. On William Simpson (probably the unnamed Boston painter in Box’s “Our Washington Letter” of 1860), see M.

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47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

Wood, Blind Memory, 251; Bethel, Roots of African-American Identity, 7; and Porter, “Versatile Interests,” 27 (and opposite 16). On Bowser, see note 214 to chapter 3 above. Thomas, “Anglo-African Exhibition of Industry and Art,” February 8, 1862, 2. G. E. S., “Army Correspondence,” Weekly Anglo-African, February 22, 1862, 2; Quadroon, “Anglo-African Exhibition of Industry and Art,” Weekly Anglo-African, February 22, 1862, 4. Edward M. Thomas, “Anglo-African Exhibition of Industry and Art,” Weekly Anglo-African, March 22, 1862, 1. “Colored Inventors, Artists, Mechanics, &c.,” Weekly Anglo-African, March 29, 1862, 2. James Gloucester, “Washington—Alexandria—Colonization,” Weekly Anglo-African, April 19, 1862, 1–2. Critic, “The Artist Mr. Wm. H. Dorsey,” Weekly Anglo-African, April 26, 1862, 2; Box, “Our Washington Letter,” 1–2. Edward M. Brown, “Exhibition of Art,” Christian Recorder, February 1, 1862, 18–19; see also the separate editor’s endorsement (also entitled “Exhibition of Art,” ibid., 18) of the proposed art exhibition of “friend Thomas, of Washington.” Bullock, Afro-American Periodical Press, 43–49; McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 132–33. E. Thomas, “Art” ( June 1862), letter dated May 1. E. Thomas, “Art” ( July 1862), letter dated June. E. Thomas, “Art” (August 1862), letter dated July. E. Thomas, “Art” (October 1862). Masur, “African American Delegation,” 130–33, 135, 137; Lorang and Weir, “‘Will Not These Days,’” n. 1; “The President in Conference with Colored Men,” Douglass’ Monthly 4 (September 1862): 712. Edward M. Thomas, “Defense of Mr. Edward M. Thomas,” Anglo-African, January 3, 1863, 1, and January 10, 4. Miss Augusta Lake, Annapolis; Miss Ada H. Hinton, Philadelphia; Mrs. Joanna I. Howard, Boston; Mrs. Harriet F. Rogers, Newark, N.J; and Mrs. Emeline Bastien, New York. Box, “Death of Edward M. Thomas,” Weekly AngloAfrican, March 14, 1863, 3; March 21, 1863, 2; R. Thomp-

63. 64.

65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

son (Thomas’s brother-in-law), “Letter from Washington,” Anglo-African, March 28, 1863, 2; “City Affairs: Death of a Prominent Colored Mason,” North American and United States Gazette, March 17, 1863, 1. A., “Letter from Newark,” Anglo-African, May 9, 1863, 1. A. P. Smith, “A Tribute to the Memory of Edward M. Thomas of Washington, D.C., Originator and First President of the Anglo-African Institution of Industry and Art, Who Departed This Life, March 9, 1863,” Anglo-African, April 18, 1863, 4. J. Cromwell, “Art Gallery and Museum,” 2 (on William Dorsey’s collection): “Passing from literature to art, it is fitting here to say that a fine bust of the late Edward Thomas, by J. Q. A. Ward, well known as sculptor, is prominent among the works of art.” On Ward in Washington, see Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 580. In 1855 the Italian-American sculptor Achille Perelli made a bust of the mixed-race New Orleans marble worker Florville Foy. Brady, “Free Men of Color,” 482. Martin Delany (in his 1852 Condition, Elevation, Emigration, 135) seems to suggest that a bronze or marble bust had been made of Frederick Douglass before 1852 and had been placed “in the museum of London,” but nothing is otherwise known of this. For a slightly later bust, in bronze, see “Grand Exhibition of Arts in New Orleans,” Anglo-African, September 17, 1864, 1 (bust of André Cailloux, a free, mixed-race military officer in New Orleans). In 1874 Edmonia Lewis made a marble bust of James Thomas, a Nashville entrepreneur who toured Europe in 1873 (Allen Memorial Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio). Franklin and Schweninger, In Search of the Promised Land, 240–41. L. Sharp, John Quincy Adams Ward, 150–51. Both busts are untraced. Savage, “Molding Emancipation.” Reliefs, 5 × 5 inches, formerly Mrs. R. Ostrander Smith, Bronx, N.Y. L. Sharp, John Quincy Adams Ward, 278–79, cats. 122–23. Two versions of the relief exist, belonging to Hirschl and Adler and to a private collection in Rochester, N.Y., as of 1985. Ibid., 253–54, cat. 106. The Beecher monument,

N O T ES T O PAG ES 191 – 195

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71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86.

252

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originally in Borough Hall Park, Brooklyn, is now in nearby in Cadman Plaza. Ibid., 73–76, plate 26. “Miscellany,” Historical Magazine 9 (April 1865): 136. “The First Exhibition of the Anglo-African Institute for the Encouragement of Industry and Art” (advertisement), Anglo-African, January 3, 1863, 4. Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia. Dorsey, in 1862, considered a sketching expedition to Africa, though it does not seem to have transpired. G. E. S., “Army Correspondence,” Weekly Anglo-African, Feb. 22, 1862, 2. Thompson, “Letter from Washington.” IBWA, 3.1:168, 170, fig. 88; also 212–13, fig. 118. A. Cromwell, Unveiled Voices, 15, 82–82, 101; Bearss, Dictionary of Virginia Biography, s.v. “Cromwell, John Wesley” (entry by Donald W. Gunter), 3:565–67. “Blackibus,” writing from Richmond, had the two parts of his letter published in the Advocate on January 27 and February 3, 1877; Dorsey’s reply is in the issue of February 10, 1877. I have not been able to locate these issues, but they are cited in Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 122–23. J. Cromwell, History. Bearss, Dictionary of Virginia Biography. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed, xxv–xxix. Ibid., xviii. Ibid., xxv–xxvi. Murray, “‘Adoration of the Magi.’” Ibid., 97; Brockwell, “Adoration of the Magi,” 3–6; Campbell, Sixteenth Century: Netherlandish Paintings, 1:352–79, esp. 352, 355, figs 2–3 (on the signatures), cat. 2970. The picture was owned by the Duchess of Sutherland’s father during her childhood. Murray, “‘Adoration of the Magi,’” 95; the other subjects he suggests to Tanner are the Queen of Sheba, and Saint Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch. These and other biblical subjects associated with Africa were already part of an 1812 album of images (with both European prints and custom-made local “paintings”) assembled by José Antonio Aponte, the free black leader of a planned slave revolt in Cuba. Pavez Ojeda, “‘Painting’ of Black History.” Savage, Standing Soldiers, 90–112; Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 175–79.

87. 88.

89.

90.

91. 92.

93.

Savage, Standing Soldiers, 114–22; Ball, My Fourscore Years. Martin Delany, “Monument to President Lincoln: The Design,” Anglo-African, June 10, 1865, 1, reprinted in Rollin, Life and Public Services, 207–8, and in Levine, Martin R. Delany, 393–95, with no commentary. Queen of Sheba: IBWA, 2:1, figs. 99–103; 2.2, figs. 11–12, 26, 43, 45, 116–17; 3.1, fig. 94; 3.2, figs. 174–75; some of these show the queen as dark skinned, while in other cases only her attendants are black Africans. Eunuch: IBWA, 2.1, fig. 56; 2:2, figs. 135, 244; 3:2, figs. 191–99; 4:1, figs. 118–20. The Queen of Sheba is referred to in Matthew 12:42 as “the queen of the south” (“regina austri” in Latin). Tears were then a charged concept; see Frederick Douglass’s provocative public letter excoriating Henry Highland Garnet and William J. Wilson’s plan to memorialize Lincoln by raising money for an educational institution, which he castigated as “an attempt to wash the black man’s face in the nation’s tears for Abraham Lincoln.” See the untitled exchange of letters in Anglo-African, September 3, 1865, 1–2, with further polemical responses by Wilson, Garnet, and Douglass (September 16, 2; October 7, 1; October 21, 1–2; November 4, 1; November 18, 1–2), and analysis in Savage, Standing Soldiers, 93–94. See chapter 2 above. Porter, Modern Negro Art, 35, 37. Some years earlier Reason had made versions of the kneeling Wedgwood slaves, and in 1852 Delany had already singled out Reason’s version of a kneeling female slave (Am I Not a Woman and a Sister) as one of the artist’s signal achievements. Delany, Condition, Elevation, Emigration, 137. For a proposal to portray two African American noncommissioned officers from the valiant Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment (Lewis Douglass, son of Frederick, and Joseph Barquet) in a commemorative medal, see “Personal,” Anglo-African, September 26, 1863, 2. In 1864 Edmonia Lewis made a statuette of another sergeant from the Fifty-Fourth, William H. Carney, rescuing his regimental flag, a sculpture that was displayed at the Boston Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Commission fair;

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94. 95.

96. 97.

98.

and in 1865 the white Boston sculptor T. H. Bartlett was gathering information for a similar statuette. G. W. F., “Fair of the Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Commission,” Anglo-African, November 5, 1864, 1; Brown, Negro in the American Rebellion, 209; Richardson, “Taken from Life,” 111, 114, 295 n. 34. See chapter 3 above and Wesley and Uzelac, William Cooper Nell, 282. “An Equestrian Statue to Col. Robert Gould Shaw,” Boston Evening Transcript, October 7, 1865, 2; “Honor to the Memory of Colonel Shaw: An Equestrian Statue to Be Erected,” Daily Advertiser (Boston), October 9, 1865, 1; Monument to Robert Gould Shaw, 7; Richardson, “Taken from Life,” 95; Savage, Standing Soldiers, 196–97; Logan and Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, s.v. “Smith, Joshua Bowen” (by Dorothy Porter), 565–66; Gates and Higginbotham, African American National Biography, s.v. “Smith, Joshua Bowen” (by Roy E. Finkenbine), 7:278–79. For a photo of Smith, see Schwarz, Lauerhass, and Sullivan, Shaw Memorial, 19. Charles Eliot Norton contributed to the Shaw memorial fund; Monument to Robert Gould Shaw, 9. See Greenough and Anderson, Tell It with Pride. Charles Bradlaugh, “A Colored Man’s Veneration for Charles Sumner,” Pacific Appeal, January 30, 1875, 2 (apparently a reprint of a piece in Bradlaugh’s National Reformer). See also “Art Notes,” American Register, May 16, 1874, 6, and Johnson, “Recollections of Charles Sumner,” 109, and also 103, 107. Sumner also owned an engraving by Z. Prevost after Veronese’s Marriage at Cana (figs. 107, 109) and two mid-seventeenth-century prints by Wenceslas Hollar of African children, which were apparently mistaken by visitors for portraits of two enslaved children Sumner had purchased and manumitted in 1854. Doggett, Biggs, and Brobeck, Impressions of Wenceslaus Hollar, 88, cats. 58, 60. Moschini Marconi, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, 221–23, cat. 394; Pallucchini and Rossi, Tintoretto, 2:35, 157–58, cat. 132, color plate 8. Sumner also owned two engravings of this picture.

99. Constable, “Cranach from the Sumner Collection,” 64. 100. On Sumner’s relationships with William Wetmore Story and Thomas Crawford, see chapters 1 and 3 above. 101. Johnson, “Recollections of Charles Sumner”; Constable, “Cranach from the Sumner Collection.” 102. Charles Sumner will, written September 2, 1872, proved April 6, 1874, Massachusetts Wills and Probate Records, 1635–1991, Suffolk County, vols. 468–69, 1874, 8–10: “to my friend Joshua B. Smith the picture known as the Miracle of the Slave.” In the will Sumner’s major gift to the Harvard libraries was to be divided between books on politics and books on the fine arts. One sculpture, Crawford’s bust of Sumner himself (Smith owned some sort of reproduction of this), was also bequeathed to the Boston museum. 103. Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, 39–40. 104. Logan and Wilson, Dictionary of American Negro Biography; Gates and Higginbotham, African American National Biography. Bradlaugh, “Colored Man’s Veneration,” 2, asserts that Smith himself was a slave when he first encountered Sumner, but Smith never said this of himself. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 196, relying on Roe, Monuments, 32, claims Smith had been a fugitive slave, but Roe is a late source (1910) with little on Smith. The same claim is made in the 1897 Monument to Robert Gould Shaw, 7. Smith’s own census declarations twice give no birthplace, once indicate Pennsylvania, and once Virginia. His death record lists Coatesville, Pa., as his birthplace, as does his obituary in the Boston Evening Transcript (“Recent Deaths,” July 7, 1879, 1). On his parentage and elaborate Masonic funeral, see also three pieces in the Boston Traveler: “Death of Mr. Joshua B. Smith,” July 5, 1879, 4; “The Late Joshua Bowen Smith,” July 7, 1879, 4; “Funeral of Joshua B. Smith,” July 8, 1879, 4. See U.S. Federal Census Records, Cambridge Ward 2, Middlesex, Massachusetts, roll M432_325, p. 41B (1850); roll M653_508, p. 425 (1860); roll M593_623, p. 341A (1870); Massachusetts State Census, 1855, reel 14, vol. 19; United States Federal Census Mortality Schedule, 1880, Non-population Census Schedule for Massachusetts, 1850–80, T1204, roll no. 39, 2, 1879, Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts, and Massachusetts Vital Records,

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105. 106.

107.

108.

109. 110. 111.

1840–1911. In these documents Smith is listed as colored or mulatto; his wife Emeline is not. Sumner, “Our Immediate Anti-slavery Duties,” 410. The work’s current location is unknown. According to Johnson, “Recollections of Charles Sumner,” Sumner had purchased the work in Paris from the American artist W. H. Kellogg, probably M. K. Kellogg (1814–1889), a painter who was in Europe from 1854 to 1858. Falk et al., Who Was Who in American Art, s.v. “Kellogg, Miner Kilbourne.” Smith’s obituary (“Late Joshua Bowen Smith”) states that Sumner had purchased it in Venice. Another (probably less reliable) account of Sumner’s acquisition of the picture is found in Stearns, Life and Genius of Jacopo Robusti, 118–19, where it is claimed that an English lady of rank gave it to Sumner “in honor of his championship of the anti-slavery cause in the Senate of the United States; and never was a gift more appropriate. It was willed by Senator Sumner, not quite so appropriately, to his colored friend Mr. J. B. Smith; and is now in the possession of George Harris, Esq., of Boston, having been purchased from Mr. Smith’s heirs for a paltry sum.” Smith to Sumner, June 7, 1860, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (1994 Chadwick-Healey microfilm version, reel 19, item 443). See, for example, letters from Smith of December 15, 1862 (reel 27, item 94), and February 4, 1871 (reel 52, item 464), and letters from Sumner, May 19, 1867 (reel 64, item 491), and January 3, 1868 (reel 81, item 343), Charles Sumner Papers. There are more than three dozen letters in the preserved correspondence. Charles Sumner Papers (reel 50, item 296). Bradlaugh, “Colored Man’s Veneration.” As reported in “Anniversary of British West India Emancipation: Convention of the Colored Citizens of Massachusetts,” Liberator, August 13, 1858, 132.

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Byrd, “American Images for Circulation”; Hollenstein and Chu, Frank Buchser, 36–40, 80–82, 149–71.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

The Volunteer’s Return, 1867, Kunstmuseum Basel; Hollenstein and Chu, Frank Buchser, 154–56, cat. 9.3. Hollenstien and Chu, Frank Buchser, 160–61 (cat. 9.7, Young Black Reading a Newspaper on a Barrel, private collection, and also Under the Tree of Knowledge, a sketch from the artist’s Basel sketchbook, no. 64). Completed December 16, 1869. Hollenstien and Chu, Frank Buchser, 158–59, cat. 9.6; Byrd, “American Images for Circulation,” 45–46, 48. Byrd, “American Images for Circulation,” 47–48, figs. 6 (Crouching Black Youth) and 7 (Negro Home in Charlottesville), and also 149 (sketches with African Americans playing the banjo). This work is not known today, but see Buchser’s Sacred Nook in Virginia, 1867, private collection; Hollenstein and Chu, Frank Buchser, 180, cat. 11.6. See the painting of an African American woman bathing in the forest, 1867–70, Kunstmuseum Solothurn; Hollenstein and Chu, Frank Buchser, 82, cat. 4.3. Charles Nordhof, “Art in Washington,” New York Evening Post, February 27, 1867, 13; “The Negro in Art— Buchser’s Paintings,” New-York Daily Tribune, January 29, 1870, 4. See also note 201 to chapter 3 above, concerning the display of Buchser’s American Blacklegs (fig. 92) in the Capitol rotunda in 1867. Hollenstein and Chu, Frank Buchser, 152–53, cat. 9.2. Twain, Innocents Abroad, 240–42. This section was not based on any of the letters by Twain that reached the San Francisco Alta and were published there. Twain, Traveling with the Innocents Abroad, 59–66, 97–99; Ganzel, Mark Twain Abroad, 142. One of the very few scholars to discuss this episode is Philip Foner (Mark Twain, Social Critic, 216–17); see also Anicetti, Scrittori inglesi e americani, 122, and Beauchamp, “Mark Twain in Venice,” 411–13. Ganzel, “Clemens, Mrs. Fairbanks, and Innocents,” 133 n. 26. H. Smith, American Travellers. Gibbes, Memoir of James De Veaux, 155–56 ( July 14). Ibid., 125 (February 26, 1843). Ibid., 128 (March 1, 1843).

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

Ibid., 146 ( June 28, 1843). Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 44–45. Schroeder, Shores of the Mediterranean, 2:225–26. Leland, Memoirs, 134–35. Yankee, Old Sights with New Eyes, 157. For discussion of the only American family I have been able to identify, in Venetian census records of the period, as resident in the city, see P. Kaplan, “Contraband Guides,” 185–86. See, for example, Nell, Colored Patriots, 323–27, and Prior, Colored Travelers, 103–25. On the antislavery activist and orator Sarah Parker Remond’s attempt to obtain a visa for France in 1860, see Bogin, “Sarah Parker Remond,” 140. After the Civil War, Remond settled in Italy, working as a physician in Florence and marrying an Italian. Salenius, “Negra d’America Remond.” Field, Memories of Many Men (also a key source for Warburg), 15. Wunder, Hiram Powers, 1:145–46. My thanks to Melissa Dabakis for apprising me of this episode. See chapter 1. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World (1858), 20. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 126–28, 138, 140–41 (and for other persons of color he encountered abroad, 38–40, 118, 123–24); Franklin and Schweninger, In Search of the Promised Land, 63–64, 70, 74 n. 37. The “darkey,” as Hosmer put it, had been in Rome as a courier to Henry Shaw Briggs, the son of former governor George N. Briggs of Massachusetts. Hosmer, Letters and Memories, 164–65. Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 28; Henderson and Henderson, Indomitable Spirit, 119. See also the case of Eliza Potter (Hairdresser’s Experience, 28–39), who worked for various employers in London and Paris in 1841–42. Wallace, Woman’s Experiences, 261. Wallace paid a call at Read’s studio in Rome, and her card was taken up to the indisposed artist by a “colored individual” whom she nicknames “Scipio Africanus.” “European Correspondence.” On the magazine, see Robertson and Loftis, “‘I Hear Nothing.”

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

Sciolino, Only Street in Paris, 212–14. The term is derived from the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, at the foot of the rue des Martyrs. On other people of color living in this zone, see Murrell, Posing Modernity, 9–10, fig. 2. Goodrich, Recollections, 2:506. Pelzer, Augustus Caesar Dodge, 196–234. On Soulé, see chapter 2 above. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World (1858), 147, 149; for similar characterizations, see Raum, Tour Around the World, 191, and Papineau, Lettres d’un voyageur, 230. Eames, Budget of Letters, 119–20. Howells, Shadow of a Dream, and An Imperative Duty, 43. Burckhardt to Max Alioth, August 11, 1879, in Burckhardt, Briefe, 7:69. The irony of the guide’s adhesion to Ruskin’s aesthetic ideas, given Ruskin’s views about people of color, is striking; nevertheless, Freeman Murray, in Emancipation and the Freed, xxxi, begins with a Ruskin epigram. Twain, Mammoth Cod (written in 1879), 23. Twain, Tramp Abroad, 561. See also a letter of 1868 cited in Hirst, “Making of The Innocents Abroad,” 129. Jarves, Art-Idea, 50, 93, 127, 149, 167, 291, 303, 304; both the terms “Renaissant” and “Renaissance” are used, very much in Ruskin’s critical sense. Foner, Mark Twain, Social Critic, 194–95, 198; Fishkin, “Racial Attitudes,” 609. Ganzel, Mark Twain Abroad, 7. Ibid., 3, 6, 13–15; Paine, Mark Twain, 1–2:309, 325. Paine, Mark Twain, 1–2:355; Mark Twain’s Letters, 2:144– 45. Paine, Mark Twain, 1–2:357–58; Mark Twain’s Letters, 2:160. Paine, Mark Twain, 1–2:355. Mark Twain, “The Treaty with China,” New-York Daily Tribune, August 4, 1868, 1–2; Mark Twain’s Letters, 2:238 n. 1. H. Cummings, Charles Ethan Porter, 51–54. On the term “contraband,” see Masur, “‘Rare Phenomenon.’” On Lieber, see T. Perry, Life and Letters; Mancini, “Francis Lieber”; and O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 1:73–81. On Lieber’s purchase of Mrs. Schuyler, see “Sale

N O T ES T O PAG ES 210 – 218

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255

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53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

256

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of Works of Art” (cited in note 107 to chapter 3) and Quick, “Bicentennial Gift,” 35 n. 1. Masur, “‘Rare Phenomenon,’” 1052, 1059, 1066. On this image, see chapter 3 above. Masur, “‘Rare Phenomenon,’” 1068–69. “City Affairs” (cited in note 62 to chapter 5). On Thomas, see chapter 5 above. Carton, Marble Faun, 110–11. N. Hawthorne, “Chiefly About War-Matters,” 50. For a more upbeat characterization of such fugitives, see an unsigned piece by John Hay in the Washington Sunday Morning Chronicle (“Local Intelligence,” March 23, 1863, cited in Hill, An Idler, 280–81). Carton, Marble Faun, 114–15; Yellin, “Hawthorne and the Slavery Question,” 152; Bentley, “Slaves and Fauns”; Cheyfitz, “Irresistibleness of Great Literature,” 540–41, 555–56; Kemp, “Marble Faun”; Parker, “War and Union,” 63. On rumors of Miriam’s blackness, see chapter 2 above. N. Hawthorne, “Chiefly About War-Matters,” 46. See the previous chapter for its troubled history. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 90–100; Culkin, Harriet Hosmer, 101–9; Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, 175–78. The

64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

figure of the “guide and assistant to our troops” carried a basket for forage, as described by Hosmer in a letter incorporated in an 1866 pamphlet, Freedmen’s Monument to Abraham Lincoln, 2, quoted in Savage, Standing Soldiers, 234 n. 18. Hosmer made a temporary revision to her plan in 1868 (“The Freedmen’s Monument to Abraham Lincoln,” Art Journal 30, no. 1 [ January 1868]: 8), without much changing the contraband guide figure, and then reverted to her initial design. Howells, “Question of Monuments” (unsigned, but certainly by Howells), 648. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 55. Howells, “Question of Monuments,” 648. Henry Tuckerman (Book of the Artists, 571), a year later, went further, asserting that “the Indian and the negro have already become significant emblems of American life in the products of art.” IBWA, 4.1:222; DeGrassi, “Francesco Pezzicar.” Howells, “Sennight of the Centennial,” 93. IBWA, 4.1:326 n. 206, cites another attack on the work by an American critic in 1877. Salenius, Abolitionist Abroad.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures. L’Abeille. See Bee/L’Abeille (New Orleans) abolitionism and abolitionists. See antislavery movement Abraham Lincoln Delivering His Second Inaugural Address (Leutze), 158–59, 159–60, 163 Absolon, John, 62 Abyssinians. See Ethiopians Adams, John Quincy, 147 Addison, Joseph, 148 Adoration of the Magi. See Magi, Adoration of Africa. See Durham, Joseph; Rogers, Randolph African American Union Literary Institute, 181 African American combatants Civil War, 113–14, 150–56, 218–22, 252n93, 256n63 (see also contrabands) in Buchser’s work, 207 on the Lincoln Medal, 142 at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, 159 on the Shaw Memorial, 200–201 Revolutionary War, 93–102, 112–18, 123–28, 154, 218 (see also Leutze, Emanuel: Washington Crossing the Delaware) War of 1812, 116 African American troops. See African American combatants African Americans, as art collectors, 186–90, 195–97 African Americans, busts of, 195, 197, 230n29, 251n65, 251n66 African Americans, conceived in sculptural terms, 57, 59 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 48, 63, 68, 70 by Nathaniel Parker Willis, 235n139, 249n15 African Americans, exclusion from U.S. citizenship of, 211, 217, 255n22 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 146, 188, 190–93 See also Union Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, 198

Agassiz, Louis, 210 Albani, Cardinal, 23–24 Albigensians, 176 Albrizzi, Iseppo, 11 Aldridge, Ira, 197 Allen, Henry Watkins, 21, 226n33 Allen, Richard, 187, 197 Alta California, 209, 217 Altona, 32 Alviero, G. A., 226n11 A.M.E. Church. See African Methodist Episcopal Church “America in Crystal,” 59–60, 60 American (Paris), 37–39, 42–43, 48, 231n42 American Blacklegs (Buchser), 150, 152, 254n8 Americans, all, as black, 23–26, 228n81, 244–45n174 American Negro Academy, 197 Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 56, 56, 200 See also antislavery movement Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?, 252n92 See also antislavery movement Ancient art and culture, 37, 42, 66, 177–78, 182–83, 191–92 Ancient Feast, 177–78, 177 Andersen, Hans Christian, 226n32 Andromeda, 63, 235n132 Andromeda (Bell), 63, 65 The Angel of the Battlefield (Leutze), 156, 156 Angling Party (Morland), 108, 109 Anglo-African. See Weekly Anglo-African Anglo-African Exhibition of Industry and Art, 190–94 Anglo-African Institute, 193–94 Anglo-African Institute for the Encouragement of Industry and Art, First Exhibition of, 193, 194 See also Anglo–African Exhibition of Industry and Art Antietam, Battle of, 150, 152

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antislavery movement, 4, 74, 175, 210 African American proponents of, 5, 27, 30, 63, 113, 187 “Am I Not a Man and a Brother/Sister?” emblems and slogans, 27, 56, 56, 76, 200, 211 and Arago, François, 71, 141 art, themes in, 1, 27, 56, 58–63, 70, 76, 130, 136–137, 149, 156, 160–63 and Beecher, Henry Ward, 28, 132, 195, 217 and Bingham, George Caleb, 116, 118, 241n86 in Britain, 30 and Brown, Henry Kirke, 129 and Brown, William Wells, 61–62 and Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 73, 191 and Byron, Lady, 45 and Carrier-Belleuse, Albert-Ernest, 70 and Child, Lydia Maria, 88, 181 and Craft, William and Ellen, 61–63, 225n6 and Delany, Martin, 198, 200 European attacks on, 39, 45, 166, 175–78 and Farmer, William, 61 and Frémont, John, 118, 133 and Fuller, Margaret, 27–28 and Garnet, Henry Highland, 187–88 and German Americans, 92 and Gloucester, James, 191 and Greenwood, Grace, 16 and Gregoire, Abbé, 41 and Hale, John Parker, 195 and Hay, John, 140 and Howe, Julia Ward, 29 and Howells, 12 and Jay, John, II, 141 in Kansas, 29, 53, 116, 229n99 and Leutze, 92 and liberty cap, 1 and Lowell, James Russell, 26 and Martineau, Harriet, 55 and Nell, William Cooper, 112–13 newspapers and periodicals, 28, 95, 113, 132, 183 (see also Douglass, Frederick) and Noble, Thomas Satterwhite, 150 and the North Star, 147 and Norton, 175–76, 181 and Piatt, Donn, 231n42

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and Punch, 58–63 and Remond, Sarah Parker, 255n22 and Roscoe, William, 76 and Sewall, Samuel, 246n195 and Shaw, Sarah Blake Sturgis, 88 and Smith, Joshua Bowen, 201–5 and Soulé, Pierre, 41 and Spence, Benjamin, 76, 82 and Story, Joseph, 82 and Story, William Wetmore, 84 and Stowe, 7, 28, 41, 53, 56, 181 and Sumner, 19, 29, 41, 201, 203–4 and Sutherland, Duchess of, 7, 43, 45, 56–57 and the Tappan family, 29, 72 and Turner’s Slave Ship, 166 and Warburg, 75 white proponents of, 5, 12, 27–29, 72, 181, 207 and Whittier, John Greenleaf, 95, 201 and women, 55, 126–28, 163 and Wright, Henry C., 61 See also Douglass, Frederick; slavery Antwerp, 192 Apollo, 182 Aponte, José Antonio, 252n85 Arago, François, 71, 141 Armenians, 15 Armistead, James, 99 Artemis of Ephesus. See Diana of Ephesus Art Journal (London), 32, 46, 49, 76, 253n82 Art Student or Rising Taste (Buchser), 207–8, 208 Aspetti, Tiziano, 227n55 Atlantic Monthly, 68, 149, 219–21, 223 Attucks, Crispus, 113, 113, 187, 200–201 Bain, Robert, 232n81 Baker, J. H., 79 Baker, Joseph, 225n1 Baldwin, James, 9 Ball, Thomas, 161, 161, 198, 247n230 Baltimore, 192, 196 Chapel of St. Mary, 146–47, 245n185 Baltimore Sun, 147 Bandinelli, Baccio, 191 Banneker, Benjamin, 189

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Bannister, Edward, 193 Barquet, Joseph, 252n93 Barrera, A., 231n44 Barthel, Melchior, 17, 18, 21, 22 Bartlett, T. H., 253n93 The Battle of Lake Erie (Powell), 116, 117 Baudelaire, Charles, 137 Becker, Jakob, 125 Bee/L’Abeille (New Orleans), 32–33, 74, 236n169 Beecher, Henry Ward, 28, 132, 195, 217 Bell, John Abyssinian Slave, 63, 233n94 Andromeda, 63, 65 Daughter of Eve, 63, 64, 68, 76, 235n133, 235n135 Octoroon, 63, 66 Bellini, Vincenzo, 89 Benedict, Erastus C., 19 Benedict of Palermo, 197 Berkeley, George (Bishop), 147 Berkeley, University of California at, 147, 245n187 Bermuda, 147 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri, 68 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 24, 25 Bethel Literary and Historical Society, 188, 197 Bethlehem, Star of, 144, 147–48 Bettina, 23–24, 26-27 Bierstadt, Albert, 140 Bigelow, John, 142 Billy, 116 Bindman, David, 51 Bingham, George Caleb, 114, 116–22 antislavery politics of, 116, 241n86 Flatboatmen in Port, 119, 121, 121 Washington Crossing the Delaware, 118, 119–120, 121 Binney, Thomas, 234n125 “blackamoor” statues, 20, 63 Blackibus (pseudonym), 197 Black Madonna, 15 Black Slave after a Beating (van Hove), 56, 57 black troops. See African American combatants Blondeau, Marie Rose, 33, 230n16 Boime, Albert, 6 Boizot, Louis Simon, 56–57, 58 Bonaparte, Jerome, 210

Book of the Artists (Tuckerman), 138, 143, 241n83, 256n66 Boone, Daniel, 118–19, 143 Bootblacks Playing Marbles (Buchser), 208, 209 Borromini, Federico, 15 Boston African American artists in, 189, 191, 193, 207 African American community in, 95, 113 intellectual circles in, 84, 86 Leutze in, 132 Matthews, John, from, 213 Museum of Fine Arts, 96, 177, 179, 201, 253n102 Faneuil Hall, 99, 113 See also Shaw Memorial; Smith, Joshua Bowen Boston Advertiser, 13 Boston Colored Ladies’ Sanitary Commission, 252n93 Boston Massacre, 112–13, 113 Bowdoin College, 5–6 Bowser, David Busthill, 155, 191, 246n214 Box (pseudonym), 188–90, 196 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 41, 184 Boyle, Cecilia. See Boyle, Eleanor Vere Crombie (Gordon) Boyle, Eleanor Vere Crombie (Gordon), 51–53, 56, 233n99 Boyle, Richard, 51 Bradlaugh, Charles, 201, 253n104 Brady, Patricia, 32, 35 Brand, Frederick B., 212 Bremen, 93 Bremer, Frederika, 66 Brewster, Anne, 138–39, 148, 247n232 Briggs, George N., 255n29 Briggs, Henry Shaw, 255n29 The Bright Side (Homer), 219, 220 bronze, as denoting black skin, 182–83, 243n125, 249n7 Brooklyn, 129–30, 156, 183, 187–88, 191, 193, 217, 251–52n70 Brown, Edward M., 191 See also Thomas, Edward M. Brown, Henry Kirke, 181, 195 Abraham Lincoln monument, project for, 130 Erie Canal, from the tomb of Dewitt Clinton, 129, 129, 188, 234n114, 242n111 Brown, John, 28, 133, 156–57, 187, 208, 219 Brown, John M., 192 Brown, Solomon G., 190–91, 193 Brown, William Wells, 61–63

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Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 73, 191 Brumidi, Constantino, 130, 131, 149 Bryant, William Cullen, 125, 128, 148, 156 Buchanan, James, 42 Buchser, Frank, 150, 152, 207–8, 208–9, 254n8 Buick, Kristen Pai, 8 Bulletin of the American Art-Union, 114–16 Burckhardt, Jacob, 216 Burnside, Ambrose, 150–52, 153 Burr, Aaron, 80 Bust of an African (Barthel), 21, 22 Butler, Benjamin, 218 Byron, Anna Isabella, Lady, 44–45, 55, 80, 233n109 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 45, 190 Cadet, François, 74 Cailloux, André, 251n66 Calhoun, John, 41 Caliari, Benedetto, 247n3 Cameron, Simon, 133, 244n140 Camper, Petrus, 170 Canova, Antonio, 73 Cántigas of Alfonso the Wise, 105, 105 Capitol, U.S. See U.S. Capitol Carlisle, Earl of, 43 Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy, 173 Carlyle, Thomas, 45, 166, 175–76, 178 Carney, William H., 252–53n93 Carpaccio, Vittore, 104, 106, 107, 170, 240n50 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, 39, 43 Carrier-Belleuse, Albert-Ernest, 43, 70–71 Carton, Evan, 86 Castellani, 66, 235n141 Catholic church, and black Africans/African Americans, 15–16 Cato (Addison), 148 Century Club, 156 Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 140 Chaplin, John G., 189–191, 193, 197, 250n33, 250n36 Chapman, John. See Chaplin, John G. Charlemagne, 196 Charleston, 38, 198, 210, 212 Charleston Daily Courier, 73 Chester, Thomas Morris, 186–89, 197

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Cheyney University. See Institute for Colored Youth Child, Lydia Maria, 88–89, 181, 207, 244n145 A Romance of the Republic, 88–89 Childs, Adrienne, 7 Chinese immigrants, 217 Chodowiecki, Daniel, 102 Christian Recorder, 191–92 Church, Frederick, 215 Chytraeus, Nathan, 226n2 Cimabue, 192 Cincinnati, 57, 191 Cinque, 197 Civil War, American, 1–2, 8–9, 88, 129, 148, 150–59, 217–22 British public opinion and, 80 German Americans and, 92 Howells and, 12 Norton and, 175, 178 Shaw Memorial and, 200–201 See also African American combatants, Civil War Clark, William, 143 Clay, Edward Williams, 237n194 Clay, Henry, 61 Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark Cleopatra, 70, 82–84, 85, 86, 88, 149 Cleopatra (Lewis), 84 Cleopatra (Story), 70, 82–84, 85, 86, 88, 149 Clichy, prison at, 214 Clinton, DeWitt, tomb of, 129, 129, 188 Clonney, James, 108, 110 coat of arms. See heraldry colonization movement, 187, 192–93, 218 Colored Library Company of Philadelphia, 186 A Colored Man Round the World. See Dorr, David Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Nell), 6, 95, 112, 113 Colored School No. 1, 183 Columbia, S.C., 129 Columbia College, 218 Columbus, Christopher, 93, 130, 144 Compromise of 1850, 19, 102 Concena, F., 240n40 Conclusion de la campagne de 1781 en Virginie (Le Mire), 99, 103 Contraband Association, 219 contrabands, 2, 156, 218–19 in Hawthorne’s “Chiefly about War Matters,” 219–21

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in Homer’s Bright Side, 219 in Hosmer’s Freedman’s Memorial, 221–22, 256n63 in Kaufmann’s On to Liberty, 156 legal definition of, 218 in Twain’s Innocents Abroad, 8, 208, 218, 223 and Ward’s Freedman, 223 Cooke, George, 109–11 Cooper, James Fenimore, 15, 23–24, 228n66 Copeland, 46, 49, 56, 70, 76 Copley, John Singleton, 12, 241n72 Cordevoille, 36, 231n36 Cordier, Charles, 56, 234n111 Correggio, Antonio da, 191 Corsica, 225n8 Coryat, Thomas, 226n2 Courrier des États-Unis, 231n46 Craft, William and Ellen, 61–63, 225n6 Crawford, Thomas, 38, 131, 253n100 Adoration of the Magi, 146 Charles Sumner, 253n102 Freedom, 1, 130-32, 132, 243n126 Liberty and History, 131 Thomas Jefferson, 243n125, 249n7 Crete, 17 Cromwell, John Wesley, 196–98, 208 Cromwell, Oliver, 95 Cruikshank, George, 49 Crystal Palace Exhibition, 59, 61–62, 76, 212, 234n129, 235n132 Cuba, 33, 252n85 See also Ostend Manifesto Cumberworth, Charles, 66–70, 67 Curradi, Raffaele, 237n216 Curtis, George, 175 Cushman, Charlotte, 23, 212 Dabakis, Melissa, 7, 8, 30 Daily Crescent (New Orleans), 32, 73 Daily National Republican (Washington), 143 Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 32, 37, 73 Daily Republic (Washington), 112 Dante, 57, 182 Darley, Felix, 242n97 d’Arnoud Gerkens, J. C., 54

A Daughter of Eve (Bell), 63, 64, 68, 76, 235n133, 235n135 David d’Angers, Pierre-Jean, 249n7 Davis, Jefferson, 1, 128, 130–31, 143 The Death of Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre, 113, 113 Death of Major Pierson (Copley), 241n72 Delacroix, Eugène, 190 Delany, Martin, 197–200, 221, 251n66, 252n92 Delaware River, 93 Délecluze, Étienne-Jean, 39 Descamps, Alexander-Gabriel, 137 Desdunes, Rodolphe Lucien, 32–35, 42, 45–46, 73, 75–76, 229n11 De Veaux, James, 16, 210–11 Dewey, Orville, 15–16 Diana of Ephesus, 182–83, 184 Diana of Ephesus, 183, 184 Dickens, Charles, 49 Digges family, 246n201 Dix, John A., 155 Dodge, Augustus C., 214 Dorfeuille, Joseph, 57 Dorr, David, 36, 61, 147–48, 212, 214–15, 231n36 Dorsey, William H., 190, 193, 196–98, 208, 252n73, 252n77 as artist, 189, 191, 196 as collector, 189, 196–198, 251n65 Douglass, Frederick, 4, 8, 75, 88, 187, 197–98 and the Anglo-African Exhibition, 193 on art, 58–59, 63, 182–83, 186–87 bust of, 251n66 on contrabands, 218 Frederick Douglass’ Monthly, 28, 113 Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 71, 82, 183–86 and the Freedman’s Memorial project, 252n90 and Greenwood, Grace, 16 at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, 159–60 New National Era, 196 North Star, 58–59, 147, 182–83 and Norton, 175 “Prejudice against Color,” 182–83 and Punch, 58–59 on the Risorgimento and Italy, 27–28, 30, 228n87, 229n94 Douglass, Lewis, 252n93 Douglass, Robert, Jr., 32, 96, 239n21 draft riots of 1863, 142, 154, 194

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Dred. See Stowe, Harriet Beecher Du Bois, W. E. B., 9, 165, 178 Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 197, 230n31 Dumas, Alexandre, père, 38, 41, 197, 230n31 Duncanson, Robert, 32, 71, 72, 76, 186, 191, 197 Dunrobin Castle, 45 Dürer, Albrecht, 2, 3 Durham, Joseph, 53, 55, 76, 233n106 Africa, 76, 77, 80 Düsseldorf, 91–93, 115, 125 Bierstadt, Albert, in, 140 Bingham, George Caleb, in, 118, 121 Chaplin, John, in, 190 Johnson, Eastman, in, 133, 238n9 Leutze in, 91–92, 106, 111, 128, 154 Malkasten, 92, 154 Perry, Enoch Wood, in, 72 Union of Düsseldorf Artists, 92, 238n3 Wimar, Carl, in, 121 Dutuit, Louis, 74 Duyckinck, Evert and George, 148 Eames, Jane Anthony, 215–16 earrings, 93, 99, 106–8, 129, 145–46, 235n141 Edgeworth, Maria, 178 Eilers, Gustav, 162 Ellet, Elizabeth F., 124 Egypt and Egyptians, 66, 68, 76, 82–84, 86, 88 emancipation. See antislavery Emancipation (Chaplin), 189, 197 Emancipation (Leutze), 160–63, 247n228 Emancipation (Pezzicar), 223, 223 Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (Murray), 6, 197–98, 255n40 emancipation in Washington, D.C., 131, 135, 157, 192 Emancipation Proclamation, 74, 135, 140, 147, 186, 192–93 and the formation of African American regiments, 113, 219 Leutze’s Burnside and, 152 Leutze’s Emancipation and, 160–61, 186 Leutze’s Westward and, 141, 186 Norton on, 8, 175 Ruskin on, 8, 175 Weeksville, celebrated in, 187

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 27–29, 72, 229n99 Epiphany. See Magi, Adoration of the; Magi, Feast of the Erie Canal, 129, 129 The Erie Canal. See Brown, Henry Kirke Escaped Bird (Lancret), 127 d’Este, Isabella, 106 Etex, Antoine, 39 “Ethiop.” See Wilson, William J. Ethiopian eunuch, 182, 200, 252n85, 252n89 Ethiopians and Ethiopia, 14–16, 63, 182, 198, 210, 226n2, 243n120 See also Ethiopian eunuch E. V. B. See Boyle, Eleanor Vere Crombie (Gordon) Ewing, Edwin, 212 Expedition at Sea, 104, 105 Exposition universelle of 1855, 38–39, 43–44, 73 Ezekiel, Moses, 230n14 Falconetto, Giovanni Maria, 249n6 Faliero, Marino, 188, 190, 250n39 Farmer, William, 61 Faustin I, 184 feet, African American, 1–2 Fellowes, Cornelius, 36, 212 Ferrara, 106, 227n51 Field, Maunsell Bradhurst, 43–45, 71, 76, 214, 232n68 Fields, Annie, 66 Fifteenth Amendment, 204 Filarete, Antonio, 243n120 The Finding of Moses (Spence), 76–80, 78–79 Fishing Party on Long Island Sound (Clonney), 108, 110 Flatboatmen (Wimar), 121, 122 Flatboatmen in Port (Bingham), 119, 121, 121 Fleischmann, Charles Lewis, 38–39, 42–44, 231n41, 231n42 Flight into Egypt (Giotto), 149, 149 Florence, 23, 73–74, 86, 89 African American family in, 212 Baptistry doors, 130 Santa Maria Novella, 226n16 Thomas, Edward, in, 188, 192 Remond, Sarah Parker, in, 223, 255n22 Warburg in, 45, 71, 73–74 Fogg Museum, 165–66, 170, 173–75, 179

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Foggini, G. B., 87 Forever Free (Lewis), 8, 8, 200 Forrest, 249n39 Fort Sumter, fall of, 84, 133 Fort Wagner, assault on, 88, 201 Four Ferrymen of the Susquehanna (Latrobe), 110 Four Moors, Monument of the (Tacca), 104, 106 Four Rivers, Fountain of (Bernini), 24, 25 Foy, Florville, 32, 36, 230n29, 251n66 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 154, 155 Franklin, Benjamin, 184 Fraser’s Magazine, 176 Freedman (Ward), 149, 150, 161, 195, 223 Freedman’s Memorial (Ball, Hosmer), 161, 198–200, 221–22, 222 Freedom. See Crawford, Thomas Freemasonry, 188 Free Soil, 116 Frémont, John, 118, 133 Fryd, Vivien Green, 6, 130 Fugitives in Flight (Noble), 122, 123 Fugitive Slave Act, 19, 203 Fuller, Margaret, 16, 26–29, 72 Gaignard, Élizabeth Eulalie. See Warburg, Élizabeth Eulalie Galli, Pietro, 33, 74 Gally, P., 240n40 Galt, John, 24 Ganymede (Warburg), 33, 42, 73, 75 Ganymede and the Eagle (Thorvaldsen), 33, 35, 43, 232n67 Garbeille, Philippe, 33, 35 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 28–29, 229n94 The Garies and Their Friends. See Webb, Frank J. Garnet, Henry Highland, 187–88, 193, 200, 250n26, 250n28, 252n90 Garrison, William Lloyd, 113, 201, 234n129 Gaudeloupe, 74 Geffrard, Fabre, 187, 189 Gemme, Paola, 27 General Ambrose Burnside (Leutze), 150–54, 153 General George Washington with a Black Military Servant (Le Paon), 99, 101, 114, 124, 137, 150 General George Washington with a Black Military Servant (Trumbull), 99, 100, 114, 124, 137, 150

Le général Washington (Le Mire), 99, 101, 114, 124, 137, 150 Geneva, N.Y., 128 Geneva, Switzerland, 142, 178 Geneva, Lake, 168, 178 Gericault, Théodore, 109–12, 111, 170 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 130 Gibbes, Robert, 210 Gibson, John, 49 Gifford, Sanford Robinson, 71, 73 Gilder, R. W., 26 Gillespie, William Mitchell, 24 Gilroy, Paul, 6 Gimignani, Giacinto, 17 Giotto, 149, 149, 192 Giraldi Cinthio, Giovanni Battista, 227n59 Gloucester, James N., 191, 193, 244n142 Glover, John, 95 Gómez, Sebastián, 190 Goodrich, Samuel Griswold, 214 Gossaert, Jan, 198, 199–200 Goupil’s, 159 Great Exhibition of 1851. See Crystal Palace Exhibition Greeley, Horace, 38–40, 118, 231n56 Greek Slave. See Powers, Hiram Greek Slave at the Great Exhibition, 62 Greene, Nathaniel, 97 Greenough, Horatio, 39, 159 Greenough, Richard, 39 Greenwood, Grace, 16 Green-Wood Cemetery, 129, 187–88 Grégoire, Abbé, 41 Grunewald-Hermann, Hotel, 230n19 Guinea, 16 Haidt, John Valentine, 245n180 Haight, Edward, 157–59, 247n221, 247n222 Haiti and Haitians, 1–2, 2, 33, 41 abolition of slavery in, 56 Alexandre Dumas and, 41, 230n31 arms of, 1–2, 225n4 François Cadet and, 74 Pierre Soulé and, 41 portraits of leaders of, 184–86, 189, 197 Hale, Edward Everett, 84

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Hale, John Parker, 195 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 228n81 Ham, 216 Hamburg, 32, 232n70 Hamilton, Thomas, 193 Hamlin, Hannibal, 195 Hammond, Harry, 212–15 Hampton, Wade, II, 16, 129 Handbook for Travelers in Northern Italy, 17 Hannibal (at Battle of Lake Erie), 241n83 Hannibal (Carthaginian), 190 Harper’s Ferry, 28, 133, 219 Harper’s Weekly, 142 Harris, George, 254n106 Harvard University, 5, 165, 178, 253n102 Haselbach, Catherine, 44, 75, 232n70 Hawkins, John, 225n9 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 21, 86–88 “Chiefly about War Matters,” 219–21 Marble Faun, 86–88, 221 Donatello, 88, 221 Kenyon, 88 Miriam, 88, 221 Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody, 86, 237n213, 237n214 Hay, John, 138–43, 148, 157, 244n156, 256n58 Haydon, Benjamin, 45 Health Trip to the Tropics (Willis), 185 Heffner, George H., 11 Hemings, Sally, 239n28 Henry, Edward Lamson, 154 heraldry, 1–2, 2–3, 225n8, 225n9 Hercules, 144 Herodotus, 182 Hicks, Edward, 98, 98, 239n26 Hillard, George Stillman, 19 Hillard, Susan, 19 Hills, Patricia, 238n9, 244n140 Hollar, Wenceslas, 253n97 Homer, 182 Homer, Winslow, 219, 220 Honour, Hugh, 6 Hosmer, Harriet, 66, 88, 212, 237n217, 255n29 Freedman’s Memorial, 198, 221–22, 222, 256n63 Howe, Julia Ward, 29

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Howe, Samuel Gridley, 201 Howells, William, Dean 4, 12–27, 222–23 as American consul in Venice, 12 An Imperative Duty, 216, 238n226 Rhoda, 216 Italian Journeys, 29 on Othello, 20–23, 227n52 on the Pesaro Tomb, 17–19 Venetian Life, 12–27, 29, 175, 216, 226n15, 228n64 views on slavery, 12 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 122 Hudson, Julien, 32, 36, 232n81 Hugo, Victor, 141, 223 Hunter, David, 141 Hunt in the Lagoon (Carpaccio), 240n50 Hutchins Center, 5 Image of the Black in Western Art project, 5–7 An Imperative Duty. See Howells, William Dean Illustrated London News, 83, 234n129 Independent (New York), 27–28, 132 Indiana, 38, 181–82, 192 The Infant Moses. See The Finding of Moses Innocents Abroad. See Twain, Mark Institute for Colored Youth, 196 Istanbul, 235n139, 249n15 Italians as black, 26–27, 228n87 Ives, Rebecca, 225n11 Jackson, Andrew, 38, 187 Jacobs, Harriet, 235n139, 249n15 James, Henry, 23, 29, 72, 74, 171, 228n63 Jarves, James Jackson, 84, 132, 149, 217 Jason, 144 Jay, John, II, 141 Jay, Mary, 141 Jefferson, Thomas, 99, 118, 183, 215, 239n28, 249n7 Jennings, Samuel, 1 Jerusalem, 198, 205, 213–14 Johnson, Eastman, 132–33, 219, 238n9, 241n73, 243n131 Johnston, John Taylor, 176, 178 Jones, Absalom, 197 Jouffroy, François, 36 Judge, Ona, 102

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Kansas, 29, 53, 116, 229n99 Kaplan, Emma Nogrady, 6 Kaplan, Sidney, 5–6 Kaufmann, Theodor, 156, 157, 219 Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 160–63, 162 Kellogg, M. K., 254n106 King, William Rufus DeVane, 211 Kip, William Ingraham, 14, 16 Knadler, Stephen, 61 Kneller, Godfrey, 102 Korn, Bertram, 32, 230n16 Lafaure, Eugène, 36 Lafayette, Marquis de, 99, 103, 150–51, 188–89, 196, 250n28 Laing, Caroline Hyde Butler, 14–15 Lake Erie, Battle of, 116 Lamar, Betsey, 26, 212, 245n174 Lancret, Nicolas, 127 Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (Noble), 150, 151 Latrobe, Benjamin, 109, 110 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 170 Le Court, Juste, 17 Lee, Gideon, 128 Lee, Isabella Williamson, 128, 242n107 Lee, William (Billy), 97, 99, 102, 239n29, 242n97 Leland, Charles Godfrey, 28–29, 210–11 Le Mire, Noël, 99, 101, 103, 239n29 Le Paon, Jean-Baptiste [Louis], 99, 101, 103, 114, 124, 137, 150 Lessing, Karl Friedrich, 93 Lethière, Guillaume Guillon, 74 Leonardo da Vinci, 191–92 Leopoldo de’ Medici (Foggini), 87 Leupp, Charles M., 128, 242n107 Leutze, Emanuel, 91-163, 181, 190 Abraham Lincoln Delivering His Second Inaugural Address, 158–59, 159–60, 163 African American servant of, 247n232 Ambrose Burnside, 150–54, 153 Angel of the Battlefield, 156, 156 David and Saul, 146 designs for regimental banners, 154 in Düsseldorf, 92–93, 154 Emancipation, 160–63, 247n228, 247n232

Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields, 124–28, 125–26, 218 in New York, 123, 132, 150, 154 Union Refugees, 156, 219 Venetian themes, 108, 240n54 Boating Party, 108 Titian on the Lagoons, 108, 108 in Venice, 91–92, 108, 238n2 in Washington, 92, 132, 139, 154 Washington as Surveyor, 123–25, 124, 128, 134, 163, 242n97 Washington Crossing the Delaware, 7, 91, 92, 93–124, 94, 126, 128, 163, 246n201 earring in, 146 exhibited in New York City, 112 exhibited in Washington, D.C., 130, 149 Johnson, Eastman, and, 133, 238n9, 241n73, 243n131 Nell, William Cooper, on, 241n65 smaller versions of, 238n9, 241n73, 243n131 spyglass in, 95, 150 tableau vivant of, in Düsseldorf, 154 Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 7, 91, 132–50, 135, 137–39, 144–45, 154–55, 160, 163, 186, 244n140 Gilcrease sketch for, 133, 136, 146, 244n140 Hawthorne and, 221 Magi vignette, 144–48, 145, 190 Smithsonian sketch for, 133, 134, 141, 146, 244n140 variation in title, 144–45, 147, 245n178 and women’s rights, 124, 126–28 youth in Germany, 91 Leutze, Eugene, 141, 154 Leutze, Gottlieb, 91 Le Vert, Octavia, 21, 26, 212, 227n55, 245n174 Lewis, Edmonia, 8, 31–32, 75, 88–89, 181, 223 Adoration of the Magi, 146–47, 245n185 Child, Lydia Maria, and, 88–89, 181, 207 Cleopatra, 84 in Florence, 73–74 Forever Free, 8, 8, 200 James Thomas, 251n66 John Brown, 156–57 William H. Carney, 252n93 Lewis, Meriwether, 133 Libby, Susan, 7 Liberator, 113

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Liberia, 184, 187 liberty cap, 1–2, 57, 130–31, 143 Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, 1 Library of Congress, 142 Libyan Sibyl (Story), 68–70, 70, 84–86, 88, 149, 200 Lieber, Francis, 218 Life of Francis Marion (Simms), 116 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 122 Lincoln, Abraham, 1–2, 133, 148, 175, 247n221, 252n90 campaign biography by Howells, 12 Douglass, Frederick, and, 159–60 election of, 188 and emancipation, 135, 160, 192, 221 Field, Maunsell Bradhurst, and, 44 Hawthorne on, 219 Hay, John, and, 140–42, 157 Hay and Nicolay biography of, 140 Leutze’s portrait of, 156–60, 158–59, 163 McClellan, George, and, 19 medal of, 141, 141–42 monument to, 130, 161, 161, 198, 200, 221, 222 Thomas, Edward M., and, 192–94 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 142 Lincoln, Robert, 142 Lincoln medal, 141, 141–42 Lincoln Monument. See Ball, Thomas Lion, Jules, 230n19 Lippincott, Sara Jane, 16 Lippincott’s Magazine, 138 Liverpool, 86, 177, 221, 248–49n39 Livorno, 104 Locke, Alain, 6, 165 London Art Journal of, 32, 46, 49, 76, 233n82 Crystal Palace Exhibition, 59, 61, 76, 212, 234n129, 235n132 Douglass, Frederick, bust of, in, 251n66 Douglass, Robert, in, 32, 239n21 Matthews, John, in, 213–14 National Gallery, 32, 198, 216 Potter, Eliza, in, 255n30 Royal Albert Hall, 236n176 Royal Horticultural Society, 236n76 Salvini performing in, 23

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Stafford House, 45–46, 49, 82, 170 Stowe in, 45, 51 Trumbull, John, in, 99 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, illustrations of, in 49 Warburg in, 36, 43–46, 63, 71, 75, 80, 118 Washington, George, prints of, published in, 102 Webb’s The Garies published in, 80 Wheatley, Phillis, poems by, published in, 197 World Anti-Slavery Conference in, 45 London International Exhibition of 1862, 76, 86 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 27, 201 Longhena, Baldassare, 17, 18 Lorenzi, Giuseppe Gallo, 248n21 lorettes, 214 Lott, Eric, 7 Low, Sampson, 51 Lowell, James Russell, 26 Mabuse. See Gossaert, Jan Madison, James, 99 Madrid, 41, 44, 80, 214 Magi, Adoration of Africans in, 6, 17, 51, 130, 143–47, 198 American examples from the eighteenth century, 145, 245n180 Chaplin, John, by, 190–91, 250n36 Florence on Ghiberti’s Baptistry doors, 130 in Santa Maria Novella, 226n16 Gimignani, Giacinto, by, 15, 17 Gossaert, Jan, by, 198, 199–200 in Leutze’s Westward (see Magi See the Star) Lewis, Edmonia, relief by, in Baltimore, 146–47, 245n185 Murray, Freeman, on, 6, 198 Rome, Propaganda Fide, 15, 17 Rome, Sant’Andrea della Valle, 14 by Ruskin, 169, 169 in Schwäbisch Gmünd, 145, 146, 245n181 after Tintoretto, 169, 169 Venice, Torre dell’Orologio, 13, 13–15, 17, 175 by Veronese, 170 Crawford, Thomas, designs for, 146 in Gospel of Matthew, 51, 144–45, 149 Star of Bethlehem and, 147–48

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Magi, Feast of the (Epiphany), 14–16, 210 Magi See the Star, in Leutze’s Westward, 143–47, 145, 190 Magniadas, Franky, 141,141 The Marble Faun. See Hawthorne, Nathaniel Marblehead, 95 Marie (Cumberworth), 66, 67, 68 Marion, Francis, 114–16 Marion Crossing the Pee Dee (Ranney), 114–16, 115, 241n73 Mark (apostle), 201–5 The Marquis de Lafayette with a Black Military Servant (Le Paon), 99, 103 Marriage at Cana (Veronese), 170–71, 172, 174, 253n97 Marshall, William Calder, 182–83 Martineau, Harriet, 55 Mary Webb Performing at Stafford House, 82, 83 Mason, John Young, 39, 40, 41–44, 86, 118, 231n51, 231n56 Massa Jonathan, 62 Matthews, John, 212–15 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 29 McClellan, George, 1, 19, 187 McElroy, Guy, 6 McGreevy, William, 232n70 McKinley, William, 140, 142 McKonkey’s Ferry, 98 McRae, Duncan, 37, 39, 41–44 Medici, Duke Alessandro de’, 86 Medici family, 86, 191, 237n213, 237n214, 237n216 Leopoldo de’, 87 Meigs, Montgomery, 128–30, 132–33 Melville, Herman, 5 Menil Foundation, 5–6 Menken, Adah Isaacs, 237n219 Mercer, Sallie, 212, 213 Michelangelo, 137, 191–92, 197 Middle Passage, 112 Mignot, Louis Rémy, 150, 151, 246n201 Milan, 33, 192 Mills, Clark, 37–38, 131 Milly, 68, 69 minstrelsy, 7, 14, 137, 226n15, 228n76 Minton, 71 Miracle of the Slave (Tintoretto), 201–5, 203–4, 253n102 Miracle of the True Cross (Carpaccio), 104, 106, 107 miscegenation, 2, 82, 154

Mississippi River, 122, 213–14 Missouri, 116, 118, 192 Missouri Republican, 140 Mitchell, Donald Grant, 227n51 Mobile River, 213 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 166 Moi égale à toi (Boizot), 56–57, 58 Monroe, James, 99 Monument of the Four Moors (Tacca), 104, 106 Morland, George, 108, 109 Morse, Samuel F. B., 38, 170–71, 173 Moses, 76, 78–79, 80, 144, 250n28 Mount, William Sidney, 207 Banjo Player, 128, 242n107, 245n174 Dance of the Haymakers, 242n107 Haymakers Nooning, 242n107 Power of Music, 128, 242n107 Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields (Leutze), 124–28, 125–26, 218 mulatto, 5, 15, 26, 36, 190, 211, 254n104 Matthews, John, identified as, 212, 214 Warburg identified as, 43, 73, 75, 232n70 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 190–91 Murray, Freeman H. M., 6, 197–98, 255n40 Murray, John, 17, 227n53 Le Nain (Paris), 232n57 Naples, 24, 28, 211, 228n93 Napoleon, 11, 234n113 Napoleon III, 142 Nashville, 212, 251n66 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 26 National Era (Washington), 95 National Gallery, 32, 198, 216 National Intelligencer (Washington), 134 National Portrait Gallery (Washington), 6 Native American(s), 38, 147, 154, 195, 221, 256n66 Capitol, depicted in U.S., 130–31 Hay, John, and, 142 in Leutze’s Westward, 143 Lewis, Edmonia as, 31 West, Benjamin, and, 12, 24 Naval Academy, U.S., 141 Neal, John, 99

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Negro Woman at the Fountain (Cumberworth), 66, 67, 68 Nell, William Cooper on Attucks, Crispus, 113, 113, 187, 200–201 Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 6, 95, 113 on Leutze’s Crossing and Sully’s Passage, 95, 97, 112–13, 123, 238n14, 241n65 Services of Colored Americans, 95 Nelson, Charmaine, 7–8 New Bern, N.C., 210 New National Era (Washington), 196 New Orleans, 73, 119, 251n66 African American artists in, 32, 36, 189, 230n29, 251n66 Bingham’s Flatboatmen in Port and, 119 Child’s Romance of the Republic and, 89 Dorr, David, in, 36, 212 Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, copy of, in, 240n59 Grunewald-Hermann, Hotel, 230n19 Haselbach, Catherine, in, 44, 75, 232n70 Howells’s Imperative Duty and, 238n226 Jews in, 32, 229–30n14, 230n19 Matthews, John, in, 213–14 Mills, Clark, in, 38 Parmly, Levi Spear, in, 231n38 Perry, Enoch Wood, Jr., in, 72 Powers’s Greek Slave in, 59, 63 Séjour, Victor, in, 35, 190 Soulé, Pierre, in, 41 St. Louis Cathedral, 33, 34, 73 waiter in Venice from, 210 Warburg in, 7, 31–36, 42–44, 55, 59, 63, 71–76, 230n19 Newport, R.I., 147 New York City African American artist’s apprentice, advertisement for, in, 72 “Anglo-African Exhibition of Industry and Art,” planned for, 191, 193 Century Club, 156 draft riots, 194 Gericault’s Raft in, copy after, 111 Goupil’s gallery, 159 Leutze, auction of his estate in, 160 Leutze and his work in, 112–13, 123, 132, 150, 154 Lewis, Edmonia, relief of the Adoration of the Magi, in, 147 Lieber, Francis, in, 218

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Matthews, John, in, 213 New York Club, 157 Plumb’s daguerreotype studio, 184 Stowe’ Uncle Tiff in, 48 Turner’s Slave Ship in, 176 Twain in, 217 Union League Club, 154, 156–57 Wilson, William J., in, 71, 183–84 See also Brooklyn New York City Metropolitan Art Fair, 113 New York Club, 157 New-York Daily Tribune, 38, 39, 217 New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, 160–61 New York Evening Post, 135, 138, 154, 156–59, 242n111 New York Herald, 128 New York Times, 154, 159 New York Twentieth and Twenty-Sixth Regiments, 154, 246n212 Nicolay, John, 140 Noble, Thomas Satterwhite, 122–23, 123, 150, 151 Northern Coat of Arms, 1, 1 North Star, 147–48 See also Douglass, Frederick Northup, Solomon, 41 Norton, Charles Eliot, 4, 165–68, 248n9, 249n44, 253n95 and the Magi, 15, 17 and Ruskin, John, 7–8, 165–68, 170–79, 205 and Story, William Wetmore, 68, 84, 86, 168 Students’ Repository, contributions to, 181–82 Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, 166 See also Carlyle, Thomas octoroon, 5, 88–89, 221, 231n36 Octoroon (Bell), 63, 66 Ohio, 12, 195 Ohio River, 123 Ohio Statehouse, 116 O’Neill, Charles Edward, 32, 230n16 On to Liberty (Kaufmann), 156, 157, 219 orientalism, 7 Ostend Manifesto, 42, 44 Othello. See Shakespeare, William Ottoman Turks, 15, 17, 21, 23, 183, 227n38

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Padua, 149, 210-11 pages, black African, 99, 106, 126, 127, 216, 227n51 Palgrave, Francis, 17 Palmer, Ray, 230n34, 232n70, 232n81 Panniston. See Peniston family Pareja, Juan de, 74 Parian, 46, 49, 70–71, 192, 233n81 and antislavery, 70 Bell, John, and, 234n131, 235n134 Carrier-Belleuse, Albert-Ernest, and, 70–71 Cumberworth’s Marie in, 70 Durham’s Africa in, 76, 80 Powers’s Greek Slave in, 59 Stowe and, 55–56, 76 Warburg and, 46, 47, 49, 51, 55–56, 71, 82 Paris, 35–43, 212–15, 230n22 African American artists in, 32, 36 American (newspaper) in, 32, 37–39, 48 American Legation in, 37, 39–42, 44, 118, 142, 211, 214, 231n42 Bigelow, John, in, 142 Bingham, George Caleb, in, 118 Carrier-Belleuse, Albert-Ernest, in, 71 Cordevoille in, 36 Dorr, David, in, 36 Dumas, Alexandre, père and fils in, 230n31 Field, Maunsell Bradhurst, in, 43–44, 71 Fleischmann, Charles L., in, 38–39, 231n41 Foy, Florville, in, 32, 36 Goodrich, Samuel Griswold, in, 214 Greeley, Horace, in, 39–41, 231n56 Hammond, Harry, in, 212–15 Hay, John, in, 142 Hudson, Julien, in, 32, 36 King, William Rufus DeVane, in, 211 Louvre, 170 Martyrs, rue des, 37, 43, 71, 214, 255n33 Mason, John Young, in, 39, 41, 44, 86, 118 Matthews, John, in, 212–15 McRae, Duncan, in, 37, 39, 41 Meurice, Hotel, 213, 215 Notre Dame de Lorette, 255n33 Opera, 212 Perry, Enoch Wood, Jr., in, 72

Piatt, Donn, in, 231n42 population of color in, 231n36 Porter, Charles Ethan, in, 218 Potter, Eliza, in, 255n30 Salon of 1846, 68 Salon of 1855. See Exposition Universelle Salon of 1867, 219 Séjour, Victor, in, 35–36, 190 Shaw, Sarah Blake Sturgis, in, 88 Soulé, Pierre, in, 41 Sumner in, 254n106 Sutherland, Duchess of, in, 43 Warburg in, 36–39, 42–43, 71–73, 75, 118, 214 See also Exposition universelle Parley, Peter. See Goodrich, Samuel Griswold Parmly, Eleazar, 37, 39 Parmly, Levi Spear, 231n38 Parrish, Frank, 212 Parry, Elwood, 6 The Passage of the Delaware. See Sully, Thomas Paul, Jeremiah, 99 Paul et Virginie (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre), 68 Payne, Daniel, 193 Peale, Charles Willson, 196 Pee Dee River, 114 See also Ranney, William Peniston family, 33, 230n22 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 33 People’s Advocate (Alexandria), 197 Perelli, Achille, 33, 35, 230n29, 251n66 Perry, Enoch Wood, Jr., 71–72 Perry, Oliver, 116, 241n83 Persico, Luigi, 159 Pesaro, Doge Giovanni, 17 tomb of, 17–21, 18, 20, 30, 73, 227n46 Peterson, John, 193 Pezzicar, Francesco, 223, 223 Philadelphia, 189, 191–92 African American artists in, 155, 189, 191–92 African American community in, 93 Bingham, George Caleb, in, 118 Bowser, David Bustill, in, 155, 191 Dorsey, William H., in, 189, 191, 196 Douglass, Robert, Jr., in 32

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Philadelphia (continued ) Leland, Charles Godfrey, in, 210 Leutze in, 91, 118 Sully, Thomas, in, 95–96, 196–97 Thomas, Edward M., in, 188–189 Washington, George, in, 102 Webb, Frank, J., in, 80, 189 settings in The Garies, 80, 186, 189 See also Colored Library Company of Philadelphia; Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 197, 223 Philip (apostle), 182, 252n85 Phrygian cap. See liberty cap Piatt, Donn, 231n42 Picayune. See Daily Picayune Pierce, Franklin, 86, 221 Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 226n2 Pitati, Bonifazio de’, 170, 171, 236n182 Pittsfield, Mass., 212 Plumb’s daguerreotype studio, 184 Plymouth, Mass., 147 Plymouth Church, 217 Porter, Charles Ethan, 218 Potter, Eliza, 255n30 Powell, William H., 114, 116, 117, 241n83 Powers, Hiram, 38–39, 57, 212 Greek Slave, 4, 57–63, 59, 183 Prevost, Z., 253n97 Prioleau, Charles Kuhn, 177, 248n39 Prioleau, Samuel, 248n39 Punch, 58–63, 60–61, 183, 234n118, 234n129 quadroon, 5, 36, 44, 75, 89, 231n36 Quaker City, 217–18 Quakers, 182, 196 Quattro Mori (Tacca), 104, 106 The Queen of Sheba’s Black Maidservant. See Ruskin, John Quito, 213 Raft of the Medusa (Gericault), 109–12, 111, 170 Ranieri, Gianpaolo and Giancarlo, 226n11 Ranney, William, 114–16 Battle of Cowpens, 114, 116 Marion Crossing the Pee Dee, 114–16, 115, 241n73

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Raphael, 163, 191–92, 196, 216 Read, T. Buchanan, 14–15, 212, 255n31 Reason, Patrick, 200, 252n92 Reconstruction, 4–5, 26, 150, 211, 222–23 Buchser, Frank, and, 207–8 Beecher, Henry Ward, and, 217 Twain’s guide and, 218 Reformation (Kaulbach), 160–63, 162 Reid, Philip, 131 Reinhart, Benjamin Franklin, 248n39 Rembrandt, 197 Remond, Sarah Parker, 223, 255n22 Renaissance, American adoption of the term, 208–9, 217, 255n43 Renault, John Francis, 99 Repository of Religion and Literature and of Science and Art, 192 Revolution, French, 1, 56 Revolutionary War, American, 1, 93–104, 112–116, 118, 123–28, 154 See also African American combatants, Revolutionary War Richardson, Marilyn, 8 Richmond, 112, 243n125, 252n77 Richmond Whig, 112 Rio de la Plata (Bernini), 24, 25 Risorgimento, 16, 27–29 Rizpah (Leutze), 125, 128 Rizzo, Antonio, 227n53 Rogers, Joel A., 6 Rogers, John, 82, 84, 137, 237n196 Rogers, Randolph, 130, 149, 234n114, 243n119 A Romance of the Republic. See Child, Lydia Maria Rome, 14–16, 30, 212 American women sculptors in (see Hosmer, Harriet; Lewis, Edmonia) Bingham, George Caleb, in, 118 Cadet, François, in, 74 Campo Verano, 74 Casa dei Catecumeni, 24 Childs’s Romance of the Republic set in, 89 Cooper, James Fenimore, in, 15, 23–24 Crawford, Thomas, in, 1, 130 Cushman, Charlotte, in, 212 De Veaux, James, in, 16, 210

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Dewey, Orville, in, 15–16 d’Europe, Hotel, 216 Ezekiel, Moses, in, 230n14 French Academy, 74 Fuller, Margaret, in, 16, 27–28 Garbeille, Philippe, in, 33, 35 Gibson, John, in, 49 Greenwood, Grace, in, 16 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, in, 86, 88 Hosmer, Harriet, in, 66, 198, 212, 221, 237n217, 255n29 Kip, William Ingraham, 14, 16 Laing, Caroline Hyde Butler, in, 14–15 Lethière, Guillaume Guillon, in, 74 Leutze in, 91 Lewis, Edmonia, in, 31, 75, 88, 147, 223 Mercer, Sallie, in, 212 Norton in, 68, 168 Pareja, Juan de, in, 74 Perelli, Achille, in, 35 Piazza di Spagna, 15, 24, 74 Piazza San Pietro, 15 Propaganda Fide, Palazzo di, 15–16, 74, 210, 226n32, 228n66 Read, T. Buchanan, in, 14, 212, 255n31 Remond, Sarah Parker, in, 223 Rogers, John, in, 82 Rogers, Randolph, in, 130 San Luigi dei Francesi, 24 San Pietro, 196, 210, 243n120 Santa Maria della Pace, 15 Santa Maria del Popolo, 74 Sant’Andrea della Valle, 14 Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, 15 San Tommaso in Formis, 15 Shaw, Sarah Blake Sturgis, in, 88 Spence, Benjamin Evans, in, 76, 80, 82 Story, William Wetmore, in, 68–70, 82–88, 168 Stowe in, 66, 68–70, 84, 168 Tappan, Caroline Sturgis, in, 29, 72, 229n99 Thomas, Edward M., in, 188, 192 Thorvaldsen, Bertel, in, 33 Van Buren, Angelica Singleton, in, 16 Velázquez in Rome, 74 Warburg in, 31, 73–74, 88 Wilde, Hamilton Gibbs, in, 71

Roosevelt, Theodore, 140, 142, 148 Rosbò, Louise Ernestine, 44, 74, 232n70 Roscoe, William, 76 Rossi, Ernesto, 23 Rossiter, Thomas, 150, 151, 246n201 Routledge, G., 80 Rubens, Peter Paul, 192 Rude, François, 39, 56 A Run through Europe (Benedict), 19 Ruskin, John, 4, 165–79, 205, 216, 255n40, 255n43 Adoration of the Magi, after Tintoretto, 169, 169 “Essays on Political Economy,” 176 Modern Painters, 166 and Norton, 7–8, 165–68, 170–79, 205 Praeterita, 170, 178, 248n4 and Stowe, 168 Queen of Sheba’s Black Maidservant, after Veronese, 7–8, 165–66, 166, 169–76, 179, 248n34 Stones of Venice, 166 and Turner’s Slave Ship, 166, 176–78 Russell’s Magazine, 212 Said, Edward, 7 Sainte-Domingue. See Haiti and Haitians Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 36 Shaw Memorial, 88, 201, 202 Saint Zeno, 215, 215 The Salon Carré at the Louvre (Morse), 170–72, 173 Salon of 1855. See Exposition universelle Salvini, Tommaso, 23, 228n63 Sampson, Alexander H., 36 San Francisco, 147, 213–14, 217 Sanitary Commission, U.S., 155 Saratoga, 124 Sardinia, 166, 169–70, 225n8 Savage, Edward, 99 Savage, Kirk, 6, 57, 130 Schama, Simon, 112 Schiller, Friedrich, 148, 245n193 Schomburg, Arthur, 197 Schroeder, Francis, 210–11 Schurz, Karl, 92 Schuyler, Catherine Van Rensselaer, 124–26, 125–26 Schuyler, Philip, 124, 126

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Schwäbisch Gmünd, 91, 93, 145, 245n181 Scott, Charlotte, 198 SCSA. See Social, Civic, and Statistical Association Sebastiano del Piombo, 216 Séjour, Victor, 35–36, 190 Senegal, 104 Seville, 190 Sewall, Jonathan Mitchell, 148, 245-46n195 Sewall, Samuel, 246n195 Seward, William, 141 Shakespeare, William Merchant of Venice, 21 Othello, 20–23, 30, 210, 227n52, 227n59 Shaw, Gwendolyn, 7 Shaw, Robert Gould, 88, 201, 202 Shaw, Sarah Blake Sturgis, 88 Shaw Memorial (Saint-Gaudens), 200–201, 202, 253n95 Sheba, Queen of, 165, 166–67, 169–70, 171, 175, 179, 198– 200, 252n85, 252n89 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 129, 217 Sierra Leone, 216 Siloam Presbyterian Church, 191 Simms, William Gilmore, 27, 116, 212, 228n86 Simpson, William, 189, 191, 193, 195, 250n46 Sir Thomas Lucy and an Enslaved Groom (Kneller), 102 Six Months in Italy (Hillard), 19 Slade, William, 147–48, 193 The Slave Auction (Rogers), 82, 84, 137 Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (Turner), 166, 168, 176–79 Slavery American, as compared to the oppression of the Italian poor, 26–29 and ancient culture, 177–78 Bell, John, and, 63 in Europe, 104, 183, 212 Fleischmann, Charles L., and, 38 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, and, 86, 219 as an issue in the 1856 election, 53 Italian republicans on American, 29 “monument to,” 19–20 Moses and, 76 Powers’s Greek Slave and American, 57–63, 234n116 Ruskin and, 175–79

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Simms’s defense of, 116 Southern aversion to sculptural depictions of, 129–30 stereotypes associated with, 207 Warburg and, 33, 36, 42 Washington, George, and, 99, 102, 123, 150 See also antislavery The Slave Ship (Turner), 166, 168, 176–79 slave trade, 59, 104, 178, 182, 225n9 Smith, A. P., 194–95 Smith, Emeline, 254n104 Smith, James McCune, 186 Smith, Joshua Bowen, 200–205, 253n96, 253n102, 253– 54n104, 254n106 Smithsonian Institution, 190, 193 Social, Civil, and Statistical Association, 188, 192–93 Solomon, 16, 165, 166–67, 169–70, 171, 175, 200 Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Bonifazio de’ Pitati), 170, 171, 236n182 Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Veronese). See Veronese, Paolo Song of Songs, 16 Soulé, Pierre, 33, 35, 41–44, 71–73, 214, 232n58 as contributor to Le Nain, 232n57 Southern Literary Messenger, 26 Spence, Benjamin Evans, 76, 82 Finding of Moses, 76–80, 78–79 Stafford House, 43, 45–46, 49, 82, 170 Stafford House Address, 45 Stearns, Junius Brutus, 102, 124, 240n43 Stehle, Raymond, 133, 160, 238n1 stereochromy, 133, 163 St. Louis, 116, 119, 121, 189 Stoddard, Charles Warren, 21 The Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 166 Story, Joseph, 81 Story, William Wetmore, 68, 74, 82–86, 171 Cleopatra, 70, 82–84, 85, 86, 88, 149 Libyan Sibyl, 68, 70, 84–86, 88, 149, 200 and Stowe, 68–70, 84, 149, 166, 168 and Sumner, 29, 84, 86 Stowe, Calvin Ellis, 232n58 Stowe, Charles Edward, 55 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 7, 27–28, 38, 43–56, 63–70, 88 and Beecher, Henry Ward, 132, 195, 217 and Bell’s Daughter of Eve, 63, 235n135

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in Britain, 45, 51, 53 and Byron, Lady 44–45, 55, 80 and the Castellani, 66 The Christian Slave, 45 and Cumberworth, Charles, 66, 68 Dred, 46–56, 63, 75 Dred, 48–49, 53, 63 illustrations to, 46–53, 47, 52, 54, 68, 69 Jake, 63 Milly, 63, 68 Nina Gordon, 48, 51 Teddy, 46–48, 51 Tiff, Uncle, 46–49, 51–53, 56, 233n103 (see also Warburg, Eugène) and the Duchess of Sutherland, 43–45, 63, 71, 80, 235n143 and Durham, Joseph, 53–55, 76 and Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, 111 gift of jewelry to, 66, 86, 235n143 Hartford, house in Hartford of, 66 “Italian and American Liberty,” 27–28 and Martineau, Harriet, 55 as a painter, 75 and Parian, 55-56, 76 and Ruskin, 168 and sculpture, 45–46, 49, 53, 63–70, 84, 149 and Soulé, Pierre, 41 and Story, William Wetmore, 68–70, 84, 149, 166, 168 and Sumner, 41 and Truth, Sojourner, 68–70, 84, 149,168 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 45–46, 53, 63, 166, 168, 233n82 illustrations to, 49, 50, 53, 76 Little Eva, 49, 71, 233n82, 243n131 performance of, 45, 55–56, 80 preface to, 43 Topsy, 63, 66, 136–37 Uncle Tom, 48–49, 71, 233n82, 243n131 and van Hove’s sculptures, 56, 234n112 and Warburg, 31, 43–56, 68, 71, 73, 75, 181, 207, 233n106 and Webb, Frank J., 80 and Webb, Mary, 45, 55–56, 75, 80 St. Petersburg, 213–14 St. Thomas, 185 Stuart, Gilbert, 99

Students’ Repository (Indiana), 181–82 Sully, Thomas, 197, 239n21 Passage of the Delaware, 95–99, 96–97, 112, 124, 150, 239n25, 241n65 Washington Leaving Mount Vernon, 102 Sumner, Charles, 201–5 and antislavery, 19, 29, 203–4 art collection of, 201, 203–4, 253n97, 253n98, 253n102, 254n106 and Crawford, Thomas, 131 and Hillard, George Stillman, 19 and Smith, Joshua Bowen, 201–5, 253n102, 253n104, 254n106 and Story, Joseph, 82 and Story, William Wetmore, 84–85 and Stowe, 41, 232n58 and Tintoretto, 210–3, 205 and Whittier, John Greenleaf, 201 The Surrender of Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown (Brumidi), 130, 131, 149 Sutherland, Duchess of (Harriet Leveson-Gower), 7, 43–51, 56–57, 252n84 and Arago, François, 71 and Bell’s Daughter of Eve, 63, 235n135 and Byron, Lady, 45, 80 and Carrier-Belleuse, Albert-Ernest, 71 and Copeland, 49 at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, 61 and Field, Maunsell Bradhurst, 43 and Matthews, John, 213–14 and Stowe, 43–45, 63, 71, 80, 235n143 and Warburg, 43–49, 57, 71, 73, 75 and Webb, Mary, 45, 80, 82 See also Stafford House Sutherland, 2nd Duke of, 43, 49, 71, 170, 232n67 Sutherland House. See Stafford House Tacca, Pietro, 104, 106 Tanner, Benjamin T., 190 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 9, 190, 198, 252n85 Tappan, Arthur, 29, 72 Tappan, Caroline Sturgis, 29, 71–72, 88–89, 229n99 Tappan, Lewis, 29, 72 Tenniel, John, 60–61, 61, 63, 76

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Thomas, Edward M., 4, 8, 188–98, 208, 217, 219, 250n36, 251n53, 251n65 Thomas, James, 251n66 Thompson, John R., 26 Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 33, 35, 43, 196, 232n67 Three Kings. See Magi, Adoration of Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, 170, 236n182 Tiepolo, Giovanni Domenico, 170 Tiff, Uncle. See Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Dred; Warburg, Eugène Times (London), 234n118 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 170, 216 Adoration of the Magi, 169, 169 Miracle of the Slave, 201–5, 203–4, 253n102 Paradise, 216 Titian, 73, 170, 191–92, 227n51 impact on Leutze of, 92, 106, 108, 156 and Twain, 209, 216 Titian on the Lagoons (Leutze), 108, 108 Topsy, 63, 66, 136–37 Touro, Judah, 230n16 Toussaint L’Ouverture, François-Dominique, 184, 186–87, 189, 197, 250n28 travel guides and memoirs, by Americans, 5, 7, 37, 43–45, 212 concerning Italy, 11–30, 210–12, 215–18 Trenton, 93, 95, 102 Trieste, 21, 23, 29, 223 Trumbull, John Battle of Bunker’s Hill, 12, 241n72 General George Washington with a Black Military Servant, 99, 100, 114, 124, 137, 150, 239n29 Signing of the Declaration of Independence, 96 Truth, Sojourner, 68–70, 84, 149, 168 Tuckerman, Henry, 138, 143, 241n83, 256n66 Turin, 168–76 Turks. See Ottoman Turks Turner, J. M. W., 166, 168, 176–79 Turner, Nat, 187, 200 Twain, Mark, 4, 214 Huckleberry Finn, 122 Innocents Abroad, 5, 8, 12, 20, 208–12, 215–18, 221, 223, 227n48, 254n10 Life on the Mississippi, 122 Pudd’nhead Wilson, 89

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Uncle Tiff (Warburg), 47 See also Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Dred; Warburg, Eugène Uncle Tom and Little Eva, 49, 50 Uncle Tom and Little Eva (Duncanson), 71, 72, 76 Uncle Tom’s Cabin. See Stowe, Harriet Beecher L’Union (New Orleans), 32, 73–75, 186 Union Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 188, 192, 197 See also Bethel Literary and Historical Society Union League Club, 154, 156–57, 247n222 The Union League Club Presenting Banners, 154–55, 155 Urbino, Mrs. S. R., 24 U.S. Capitol, 118–19, 128–50, 244n142 African Americans, exclusion of images, from, 130–32, 149 Brown’s pediment relief, 129 Brumidi’s Surrender of Cornwallis, 130, 131, 149 in Leutze’s Abraham Lincoln, 159–60 Leutze’s projects for, 93, 118–19, 128, 154 Emancipation, 160–63, 247n228 Washington Crossing the Delaware, temporarily displayed in, 130 Westward the Course of Empire, 7, 132–50 Powell’s Battle of Lake Erie, 116 Rogers’s Africa, 130, 149 rotunda of, 130, 148, 150, 249n7, 254n8 sculpture atop dome (Crawford’s Freedom), 1, 130–132 Van Buren, Angelica Singleton, 16 Van Buren, Martin, 16 Van Dyck, Anthony, 150 van Hove, Victor, 56, 57, 234n112 Vasari, Giorgio, 191 Velázquez, Diego, 74 Venetian Life. See Howells, William Dean Venice, 11–14, 26–30, 171–73, 208–12, 254n106 Accademia, 106 African American guide in, 5, 8, 208–11, 215–218, 223 African gondoliers in, 12, 104–6 Africans, enslaved, in, 12, 104 Correr Martinengo, Palazzo, 210 Ducal Palace, 21, 108, 216, 227n55 Faliero, Marino, doge of, 188, 190 Frari, church of the, 12, 73 (see also Pesaro, Doge Giovanni: tomb of )

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lawyer from Sierra Leone in, 216 Leon Bianco hotel, 210–11 Leutze in, 91–92, 108, 238n2 “Othello, house of,” 21, 227n52 Othello in, 20–23, 210 Pesaro tomb in, 12, 17–21, 18, 20, 30, 73 San Marco church of, 12 Piazza, 12, 13 Scuola Grande di, 201 San Rocco, Scuola Grande di, 169 Torre dell’Orologio, 13–14, 13, 17, 175, 226n11 mori, 226n15 Twain in, 5, 8, 20, 208–11 Warburg in, 71–73, 88 See also Howells, William Dean Vernet, Horace, 137 Verona, 21, 215 Veronese, Paolo, 4, 106, 175–76, 179 Christ at Emmaus, 248n21 Finding of Moses, 80 Marriage at Cana, 170–71, 172, 174, 253n97 Martyrdom of St. George, copy after, 248n21 Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 8, 165–66, 167, 169–76, 179, 247n3 Vesey, Denmark, 187, 200, 249n39, 250n28 Victoria, Queen, 43, 51 Vienna, 23, 213 Virey, Julien-Joseph, 170 The Virginian Slave (Tenniel), 60–63, 61 waiters, African and African American, 28, 116, 154, 171, 172–74, 177, 177, 210, 246n206 Wallerstein (Schiller), 148 Walther, Thomas, 130 Warbourg, Eugène. See Warburg, Eugène Warburg, Aby, 32, 229n13 Warburg, Daniel (businessman), 32–33, 229n13, 232n70 Warburg, Daniel, aka Joseph Daniel (stoneworker), 32–33, 45 Warburg, Daniel Jr., 32–33 Warburg, Élizabeth Eulalie, 236n173 Warburg, Eugène, 4, 7, 31–57, 66–83, 86–89, 181, 185, 223 and the American Legation in Paris, 37, 39, 41–44, 118, 211 Bacchante, 42, 75

death and funerary notices, 74–76, 186, 236n169 departure for Europe, 36 and the Duchess of Sutherland, 43–49, 57, 71, 73, 75 and the Exposition universelle, 39, 42–43 and Field, Maunsell Bradhurst, 43–45, 71, 76, 214, 232n68 First Kiss, 73 Ganymede, 33, 42, 73, 75 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, compared with, 221 in Italy, 71–74 Jewish heritage, 32, 39, 75, 229n13, 229–30n14 legal name of, 230n16 Leutze, compared with, 91 Mason, John Young, bust of, 39, 40, 41–42, 44, 86, 118, 231n51 Matthews, John, compared with, 214 McRae, Duncan K., bust of, 37, 39, 41–42 as mixed-race, 31, 36–37, 43, 73, 75 and Soulé, Pierre, 33–35, 41–42, 44, 71–73, 75, 214 St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, floor of, 33, 34, 36, 73, 230n19 and Stowe, 31, 43–56, 68, 71, 73, 75, 181, 207, 233n106 Uncle Tiff, 46–53, 47, 56–57, 66, 71, 73, 75–81, 86, 235n135 wife or wives of, 44–45, 73–75, 232n70 Young Fisherman Playing with a Crab, 37, 39 Warburg, Lorenza, 44, 232n70 Warburg Institute, 5, 32 Ward, John Quincy Adams, 149, 150, 161, 195, 197, 223, 251n65 Ward-Jackson, Philip, 71 Washington, Booker T., 178–79 Washington, D.C. African American community in, 148, 188–94, 208 Buchser, Frank, in, 207–8 Cromwell, John Wesley, in, 197 emancipation in, 135, 157 Fleischmann, Charles L., in, 38 Gericault’s Raft, copy of, in, 240n59 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, in, 219 Hay, John, and housing in, 142 Leutze in, 92, 132, 139, 154 Library of Congress, 142 Mills, Clark, in, 38 Sumner in, 201 Thomas, Edward M., in, 188–89, 195

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Wachington, D.C. (continued ) Union Bethel African Episcopal Methodist Church, 188, 192, 197 Ward, John Quincy Adams, in, 195 See also U.S. Capitol Washington, George, 4, 187–89, 210, 250n28 accompanied by African Americans in works of art, 7, 98–99 in Brumidi’s Surrender of Cornwallis, 130, 149 in Chodowiecki’s Washington’s Entry into Philadelphia, 102 in Bingham’s Crossing, 118, 122 in German and English prints, 102 in Le Paon’s portrait of Washington, 99, 114, 124, 137, 150 in Leutze’s Crossing, 7, 93–98, 102–4, 109–18, 123, 130, 146, 149 in Leutze’s Emancipation, 161, 163 in Leutze’s Washington as Surveyor, 123–25, 134, 163 in Neal’s Randolph, 99 in Paul’s Death of Washington, 99 in Renault’s Surrender at Yorktown, 99 in Rossiter and Mignot’s Washington and Lafayette, 150, 246n201 in Savage’s Family of Washington, 99 in Stearns’s images of the life of Washington, 102, 124, 240n43 in Sully’s Passage, 95–99, 112, 124 in Sully’s Washington Leaving Mount Vernon, 102 in Trumbull’s portrait of Washington, 99, 114, 124, 137, 150 and emancipation, 102, 161, 163 as military commander, 93–104, 113–14, 118, 122–23, 130, 150, 239n29 as slaveholder, 97, 99, 102, 123, 150 statues of, 128, 183–84, 243n125, 249n7 as surveyor, 123–24, 242n97 Weems’s biography of, 116 Washington, William, 114 Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784 (Rossiter and Mignot), 150, 151, 246n201 Washington as Surveyor. See Leutze, Emanuel Washington at the Delaware (Hicks), 98, 98 Washington Crossing the Delaware (Bingham). See Bingham, George Caleb Washington Crossing the Delaware (Leutze). See Leutze, Emanuel

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Washington Lyceum, 190 Washington Sunday Morning Chronicle, 140 Washington Treading on a British Flag, 102, 104 Webb, Frank J., 80–82 The Garies and Their Friends, 80–82, 81, 186, 189 Walters, 186, 189 Webb, Mary, 45, 56, 75, 80–82, 83 Webb, William, 241n73 Wedgwood, Josiah, 56, 56, 76, 200, 252n92 Weekly Anglo-African (New York), 147, 188, 190–95, 198, 226n32 Weeksville, 187 Weems, Parson, 116 Weir, John Ferguson, 145, 245n178 West, Benjamin, 12, 23–24 Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. See Leutze, Emanuel Wheatley, Phillis, 197 Whipple, Prince, 95, 97, 112–13 whiteness, 24, 26–27, 30, 57 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 95, 201 Whittredge, Worthington, 160, 240n61 Whortley, Lady, 59 Wilde, Hamilton Gibbs, 71 Wilkinson, James, 239n22 Williams, True W., 20, 20, 227n48 William Wetmore Story and His Friends ( James), 171 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 23, 185, 235n139, 249n15 Wilson, William J., 71, 183–188, 193, 252n90 “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” 183, 186 Wimar, Carl, 121, 122 The Wings of the Dove ( James), 171 Wise Men. See Magi, Adoration of Woman’s Journal, 146 The Women of the American Revolution (Ellet), 124 Wood, Marcus, 6 Wood, Peter, 6 Wright, Henry C., 61 Yorktown, 99, 130, 244n156 Zeno, 215, 215

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