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Eastman Johnson's 'Negro Life at the South' and urban slavery in Washington, D.C
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1998 by John Davis
In October 1938, as the culmination of a year-long campaign to bring reproductions of the world's finest paintings to a popular audience, Life magazine ran an elaborate, twelve-page feature under the optimistic headline, "American Art Comes of Age." The article, a celebration of the varied achievements of the "native school," presented a montage of twenty-eight small black-and-white reproductions and eleven larger "masterpieces" printed in full color. Included in this more selective group were such stalwart American images as George Caleb Bingham's Verdict of the People, Thomas Eakins's Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (The Champion Single Sculls), and Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South (identified in this case by its more popular title, Old Kentucky Home; [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]). Of the latter, the Life readership was informed in a short caption that Johnson's work was "an idealization of slavery" and a representative illustration of the "romantic painting" of the 1850s.
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Twenty-eight pages earlier, in a seemingly unrelated story, a very different image was reproduced. In a section devoted to the general news of the week, a photograph depicted a well-dressed white woman looking up in surprise at a weather-beaten frame row house with a crumbling stoop. As she gazes openmouthed at the unkempt dwelling, the woman walks by a frowning African American schoolgirl who has withdrawn to let her pass. Refuse litters the ground at their feet. The caption explains, "Mary Pickford walked into a back alley in Washington, D.C. The camera registers her look of amazement and the wondering expression of a Negro tenement girl. 'I don't know how human beings can exist in places like these,' said America's onetime sweetheart."(1)
Although certainly unintentional, the juxtaposition of these two images within the pages of a single issue of Life functions as an ironic commentary on the changing attitudes toward a major icon of American slavery. The texts of the accompanying pair of magazine captions, despite the fact that they appeared eighty years after Johnson painted Negro Life at the South, nicely encapsulate two opposing poles of interpretation of the famous painting, two possibilities for understanding the way in which it might have found meaning for a national audience on the eve of the Civil War. The first view, which has largely governed the historiographic afterlife of the work, sees it as a generic, romantic image of "life in the South," a broad national stereotype of plantation culture. The second approach, however, the one proposed in the present essay, argues for greater attention to the geographic specificity of the painting. Like Mary Pickford, the beautifully gowned white woman hesitating on the threshold at the right of Negro Life at the South has entered an unusual and particular space. She has crossed into the "secret city" of black life in the interior of a Washington city block.(2) It is this urban setting in the antebellum era, along with Johnson's experience of it, that bears examination.
Negro Life at the South has not suffered from a want of attention by scholars. It was in the nineteenth century, and remains today, probably the best-known painted image of American slaves, and it is widely acknowledged as the most significant work of Eastman Johnson, one that effectively launched his career when it was first exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1859. The great success of the painting at the time of its debut in New York has usually been ascribed to its ability to be all things to all people. For abolitionists, the decrepit, tumbledown living conditions pictured by Johnson matched the moral degeneracy of the institution of slavery, while for slavery's defenders, the careless leisure-time activities of several generations of slaves provided visual proof that forced servitude was neither physically onerous nor destructive of family life. This ambiguity of viewpoint - along with undertones of the theme of miscegenation, focused in particular on the light-skinned young woman standing at left in the painting - has been the primary concern of most recent scholars.(3) The main question, at least indirectly, has centered on intentionality: Did Eastman Johnson create Negro Life at the South as an indictment of Southern slavery, or was it intended as a sop to apologists of the peculiar institution? Or, perhaps was it simply a shrewdly constructed document of judicious neutrality?
My purpose here is not to pronounce definitively on the question of Johnson's attitudes toward slavery in 1859 (although I will, nonetheless, have a good deal to say on the subject), nor will I focus exclusively on the issue of whether Negro Life at the South was designed to, or did in fact, support or condemn slavery. The record is clear that it was seen, at least, to do both.(4) What I would like to do is amplify considerably the nature and evidence of this debate and, in the process, increase our understanding and appreciation of the multivalent resonance of this single, iconic image. This will involve resituating the painting in the specific urban context of Washington, D.C., examining closely the neighborhood and house in which Johnson and his family lived, tracing the explosive national debate on slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, considering the nature of the urban slave community in the light of recent scholarship on the subject, surveying the critical reaction to the image in 1859 and the several following decades, and analyzing the subsequent private ownership of Negro Life at the South. I will argue, in the end, that the draining of its site-specific content, the nostalgic blunting of the image into a generalized "Old Kentucky Home," is closely tied to Johnson's unusual engagement with the volatile issue of slavery in the nation's capital.
