Blackness and Nineteenth-Century Art in the Atlantic World

The prevalence, and ultimate legal demise, of the slave trade formed a context through which Black people moved throughout the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century. Over the last five years, historians have reckoned with the fact that the transit of artworks—paintings, sculptures, and prints—was intimately intertwined with the economy of slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade in particular. Large-scale exhibitions and art collections were funded through the profits generated by enslaved labor, and the antislavery movement promoted the arts in service to its cause by circulating images and objects across the Atlantic Ocean. The Image of the Black in Western Art (1960–2024) and Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983) were two early attempts to grapple with overlapping discourses of Blackness, slavery, African American culture, and art. The former is a multi-decade Harvard University project that looks at art with a capital A, analyzing visual expressions that are cared for by some of the largest and most prestigious museums in the world, including the Louvre, Prado, British Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. The latter, Robert Farris Thompson’s germinal book, focused on what could be called “folk” culture, including music, dance, architecture, fiber arts, and religious expressions. With the digitization of vast archives of print and photographic materials in the twenty-first century, more recent studies of the nineteenth century instead trace historical actors and aesthetic debates across gendered, racial, and class divisions with remarkable precision to reveal the impact of Black self-awareness and self-advocacy on artistic representations of Blackness. Persistence and contingent freedoms are vital themes that are now researched in the context of artistic practice and political negotiations, as opposed to the twentieth-century investigation of figures, forms, colors, and linework.Three books published since 2020 open new horizons for studying diasporic Blackness in nineteenth-century art, with a particular emphasis on the African American experience. Aston Gonzalez is a historian of visual culture produced by Black abolitionists, and his first book, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (2020), analyzes prints, photographs, and panoramas created by Robert Douglass Jr. (1809–87), Patrick Henry Reason (1816–98), Augustus Washington (1820/1821–75), and James Presley Ball (1825–1904). This book uncovers significant insights through Gonzalez’s attentive reading of African American newspapers. In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (2021) is edited by two historians, Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene, with an introduction by historian of racial formation James Sidbury and an epilogue by historian of race and racism in the Atlantic world Gerald Horne. Some contributors to this collection of essays are emerging scholars who bring new interdisciplinary methodologies to their analyses, and all authors included in the collection blend historical rigor with literary criticism, religious studies, and performance studies to foreground the work of non-elite persons in building cross-cultural connections between the Americas, Europe, and Africa. While In Search of Liberty does not center visual culture, its historiographic innovations are notable in relationship both to Gonzalez’s monograph and a recent book by art historian Caitlin Meehye Beach, Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery (2022). Art historians traditionally fall back on national or geographic categorizations, rigid individualism, and linear progressions of artistic movements in making their analyses, a historiographic foundation evidenced by nearly all the survey textbooks in the field. Beach’s book catches art history up to history with fresh research on the global impact of some of the most widely viewed artists of the nineteenth century, such as Hiram Powers (1805–73), John Bell (1811–95), Francesco Pezzicar (1831–90), and Edmonia Lewis (1833–1907). Together, the three books by Gonzalez, Beach, and Johnson and Power-Greene point toward a growing realization that history, art history, and other humanities disciplines are currently impacted by the traumatic events we study in the past and that we must work across disciplines to make our histories of Blackness and the nineteenth century more accurate.A comparative analysis of all three books reveals four shared themes: cultural fluency as expressed in texts and images, unique case studies that can put pressure on assumptions and generalizations about Blackness and African Americans, ambiguous icons that simultaneously proclaim and limit Black freedoms, and the continually reverberating echoes of slavery in the compositions of global Black identities past and present. In all three books, Black artists and activists evidence remarkable cultural fluency, as they understood that their images, texts, speeches, and acts would be interpreted within multiple cultural frameworks in various locations across the world. Slavery, poverty, violence, and the promise of prosperity encouraged Black mobility and fugitivity, and in cultural expressions, we see Black people transform their migratory experiences into a powerful fluidity of expressions and interpretations. Indeed, by tracing the histories of specific people, designations of freedom, race, class, and gender are shown to be quite porous and contingent, with individuals moving into multiple situations and cycling through various identities throughout their lives. Blackness, especially in the nineteenth century, becomes a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, overflowing with the spirit of liberation while haunted by the brutalities of enslavement.Cultural fluency empowered prominent African American women to move throughout the United States and the Atlantic world even as their freedoms and lives were under threat. Pia Wiegmink’s comparative essay on the manuscripts and published personal narratives of Nancy Prince (1799–1859), Harriet Jacobs (1813–97), and Eliza Potter (1820?–93) emphasizes the authors’ varied, self-determined reinventions in Canada, England, France, Jamaica, and Russia in the 1840s and 1850s, all of which “shed light on the heterogeneity of African American women’s life writing.”1 Two case studies in Gonzalez and Beach’s books reinforce the diversity of African American women’s experiences. James Presley Ball’s enigmatic and emotionally charged 1862 photograph of a Black woman from Nicholasville, Kentucky, seated between two soldiers from Wisconsin portrays a woman on the move, having been hidden from her enslaver by the two soldiers standing at her side and aided in her escape by the abolitionist Levi Coffin (1798–1877) (fig. 1). Gonzalez’s visual analysis highlights the various methods Ball used to imbue his photograph with a palpable sense of danger, while Coffin’s written account describes the woman in the photograph changing her appearance to that of a young soldier, poor woman, and wealthy lady in order to evade her captors.2 Edmonia Lewis also keenly understood that her moves from New York to Oberlin University to Boston were a background from which people would interpret her busts of Union soldiers Robert Gould Shaw (1837–63) and William H. Carney (1840–1908) as the sculptures circulated in abolitionist circles at the end of the Civil War. As Beach evidences, the sale of these busts helped fund the establishment of Lewis’s studio in Rome, Italy.3 While Douglass Jr.’s 1837 travel to the Caribbean to paint the people and landscapes of Haiti is a significant precursor to these women’s travels, all three books emphasize the effective cultural fluency of Black women, especially in the creation of images and writing of narratives that resonated across the Atlantic world.4The specificity of each person’s story as they continually reinvented themselves in various cultural and geographical contexts puts pressure on any set definition of what it meant to be Black in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. For example, Robert Douglass Jr. was an avid supporter of the abolitionist cause, but Gonzalez’s close reading of the artist’s self-promotion shows him pushing the boundaries of his politics even as he challenged the racial caste system. In one of the most infuriating moments in American art history, Douglass was refused entry to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on the very day that he became the first African American to be acknowledged as an artist of a painting in their galleries, and he used the story of his expulsion from the academy to market his artworks for decades after the incident.5 Douglass also promoted his lithographic portrait of William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) in both abolitionist and mainstream newspapers, selling one copy to an enslaver from Mississippi who bought several abolitionist pictures to bring home to the South.6 Gonzalez lets these complexities breathe without oversimplifying Douglass’s position. In the In Search of Liberty collection, Marcus Brice engages with another layered case study. In the 1890s, the Congo was one of the most notoriously violent and exploitative colonies in Africa, and the diaries of George Henry Jackson (1863–1943) record his conflicted role as an African American exploring his Blackness while working as a medical agent from the American Baptist Missionary Union to the Congo. Brice traces a throughline between Jackson’s colonial work and his advocacy for Pan-Africanism, concluding that he “set out to redeem Africa and the world, and while he had failed at both tasks, he had discovered and learned how to save and value himself.”7 Both Douglass and Jackson, in their own ways, developed the self-confidence necessary to correct misconceptions, and their archives challenge us to do the same.Given the contradictions inherent in the search for freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, it is no surprise that some of the most iconic images produced in the era are ambiguous in their intent and interpretation. Beach excels at analyzing artworks familiar to many Americanists and uncovering new evidence that deepens our understanding of their paradoxical nature. Her chapter on Powers’s The Greek Slave (issued in multiple versions between 1843 and 1866) sits with the fact that the nude female figure carved from white marble was the most acclaimed sculpture of an enslaved woman by an American artist, and at the same time, that the artwork was funded, in part, by Powers’s patron John Preston (1809–81), who made his fortune managing sugar plantations in Louisiana.8 Beach points to instances when the sculpture, which was based on testimonies from the war for Greek independence, was nonetheless fully immersed in the context of American slavery. Powers exhibited a version of the sculpture at Cook’s Gallery, across from the Saint Charles Hotel and Exchange, one of New Orleans’s largest and most notorious slave auction houses, and at the Great Exhibition in London, where William Wells Brown (1814–84), William Craft (1824–1900), and Ellen Craft (1826–91) protested the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) in front of the statue (fig. 2).9 However, Beach’s most original insights come from her extensive study of Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, 1863 (1873), famously featured in the art pavilion of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia (fig. 3).10 The author traveled to Italy and Austria to study the sculpting and casting of a monumental figure that, contrary to its celebrated portrayal on the cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, was soundly critiqued in the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Christian Recorder as a failure for being too literal.11 Gonzalez likewise draws out ambiguities inherent in two of Reason’s most widely distributed engravings to produce fresh interpretations of the so-called Supplicant Slave (fig. 4) and the frontispiece to the Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb with an escaping figure below the portrait (fig. 5).12 Gonzalez argues that Reason intentionally obscured the faces and bodies of enslaved people so one could interpret the companion image in any number of locations and circumstances. While Caree A. Banton’s essay on “Liberia as a Theater” in Johnson and Power-Greene’s edited collection does not rely on visual analysis, she does draw on art history and performance studies to parse Liberian performances of civilization, as defined by white society, in the service of establishing a rare self-governing, free Black community. As Banton summarizes, “With both racism and benevolence birthing the emergence of Liberia, the colony emerged within a theater of contradictions.”13Such paradoxes, fragmentations, and ambiguities swirl around representations of Blackness then and now, especially as it is enmeshed with the legacy of slavery. As historians, we all find ourselves haunted, trapped, and misdirected by images of slavery, which William Wells Brown argued was inherently unrepresentable.14 Perhaps this is why Saidiya Hartman is so frequently referenced in both In Search of Liberty and Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery. Hartman reminds us that violence, terror, and the denial of freedom demand performances to the contrary, as oppression will not allow itself to be seen head on. Thus, the appearance of liberty can obscure resubordination and indebtedness, and empathy for the oppressed can ironically reinforce power structures. Therefore, all historians need to be wary of instances when enslaved bodies become, as Beach puts it, “not merely visible but deliberately spectacular.”15 Frederick Douglass (1818–95) struggled with his visibility after his enslavement, embracing photography as a technology through which he could control his own image, while at the same time, he acknowledged that the interpretation of Black subjects was ultimately out of their control.16 Claire Bourhis-Mariotti finds a similar conundrum in Douglass’s appointment to the commission for the annexation of the Dominican Republic in 1871. Douglass spoke in the Caribbean about the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1870) and an expansion of enfranchisement that would occur if the island would become a territory of the United States, while at the same time, the annexation would deny Black self-governance across Hispaniola. His appointment to a high-ranking diplomatic position signified a personal achievement, but to audiences in the Caribbean, his accomplishments seemed to be co-opted into an expansionist state.17 Gonzalez’s study of W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1869–1963) exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition suggests that the display of photographs, statistical charts, and demographic information was successful because Du Bois paired images of prosperous African American communities in Georgia with racially discriminatory laws from colonial times to the present (fig. 6).18 Du Bois’s model for displaying struggle challenges us as historians to push against superficial interpretations of images and sculptures. Instead, we must develop cultural and historical fluency in ourselves and our audiences to be able to interpret artworks in multiple contexts.The humanities disciplines referenced in the three books reviewed here—history, art history, English, performance studies, Black studies, and more—have faced enormous challenges in recent years, with pressures both internal and external to the fields. Books by Beach, Gonzalez, and Johnson and Power-Greene suggest that an ever-deepening collaboration is on the horizon and that, despite diminishing financial support for the humanities, our histories will more adeptly navigate complexities inherent in the study of Blackness and art in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. The common themes across all three books show that, even from various disciplinary perspectives, historians are in discourse over shared concerns and issues, and we are deepening our understanding of one of the most harrowing and exacting time periods in human history. These texts also hold a promise that we can—indeed, we must—come together to face the truth of slavery and its echoes in the present day. Our own search for liberty depends on confronting this truth.

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