Art in CONTEXT

In the 1840s, when the maturing African-American portraitist, still-life, and landscape artist Robert Scott Duncanson lived in and around Cincinnati, the city was a hotbed for discussions on slavery and emancipation. The year 1841, the year Duncanson moved to Mount Healthy, 15 miles north of Cincinnati, also saw the city's notorious race riot. Throughout the decade, Cincinnati negotiated its position as a safe place for freed slaves while keeping its strong economic ties to the South. It is in this context that Duncanson created works such as Mayan Ruins, Yucatan, which although it does not directly address, may suggest the contemporary social and political climate of the day.Ostensibly, this painting falls within a type of exotic landscape practiced by such landscape greats as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, or Martin Johnson Heade. As did many painters of this time, Duncanson turned to illustrations from books and periodicals to find the inspiration for his paintings. The 1840s, an important formative time in Duncanson's career, saw pioneering explorations of Central America by two Englishmen, John Stevens and Frederick Catherwood. Their travels were published in 1843 as Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan and, not surprisingly (since Duncanson never traveled to South or Central America), an engraved illustration of the primary building at Kabah (vol. I, plate 15) seems to have provided the inspiration for Duncanson's fantastic picture.

Letters show that the light-skinned Duncanson was well aware of his minority status in a world of predominantly white male artists. The largely self-taught artist relied heavily upon commissions from wealthy Cincinnatians and abolitionists, especially Nicholas Longworth for whom he painted landscape murals in the Longworth home (now the Taft Museum). Patrons like Longworth felt at ease with Duncanson's Hudson River School-derived landscapes and specifically enjoyed the lack of overt attention to racial issues within his works. Nevertheless, works such as this one may indirectly point to another heated racial debate of the time, that of the origin of the Maya, the indigenous people of Mexico, Central and South America. As such, this work may show Duncanson's knowledge of the contemporary interest in the Maya who had been "rediscovered" in 1839 as well as an acknowledgement of questions regarding race and personal identity.

Todd D. Smith and Dominique H. Vasseur

SUGGESTED READINGS:

Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth- Century America. Exhibition catalogue. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1985.

Ketner, Joseph D. The Emergence of the African-American Artist: Robert S. Duncanson 1821-1872. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Manthorne, Katherine. Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1989.

Mcelroy, Guy. Robert S. Duncanson: A Centennial Exhibition. Exhibition catalogue. Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1972.

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