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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
Picture Buying and the Slave Economy
If one concept can be said to characterize interpretations of Johnson's image, it is that of ambiguity. The remarkable mutability of meaning of Negro Life at the South almost leaves the impression of the painting as a shapeless entity, endlessly shifting and adapting in reaction to changed social and political conditions. Despite a bewildering number of attempts to define it, Negro Life at the South has retained a certain elasticity, refusing to be harnessed to a single political agenda or to the particular needs of specific viewers. Moreover, these "viewers" are, at least in the nineteenth century, largely anonymous figures, their opinions historically constructed from unsigned periodical reviews and by inference from knowledge of the slavery debates of the day. To conclude with some measure of concreteness, however, we can examine a more selective audience: the pair of private collectors who owned the painting before it passed into the public realm. Here, at least, it is possible to consider historical evidence pertaining to specific individuals and posit reasons for their attraction to the work. Here, we presumably see the painting "at work," responding to the particular aesthetic or political tastes and preferences of its owner.
Two men, William P. Wright and Robert Stuart, owned Negro Life at the South between 1859 and 1882. Wright bought it from the National Academy exhibition for $1,200, kept it until 1867, and then offered it at auction with the rest of his substantial collection. The painting, which apparently failed to reach its reserve at this auction, was purchased by the selling agent and was sold in March 1868 to Robert Stuart for $6,000, remaining in his possession until his death in 1882.(70) These two owners of Negro Life at the South were surprisingly similar individuals. Both wealthy New York merchants, both of recent British extraction (Wright was an immigrant, Stuart the son of an immigrant), and both lacking heirs, they devoted a large part of their vast fortunes to assembling substantial collections of American and European paintings. Most significant, however, is the nature of those fortunes. Wright made his wealth as a cotton broker, and Stuart was the largest sugar refiner in New York City. Both fortunes, it cannot be emphasized too much, were entirely dependent on an economy based on the backbreaking toil of African American men and women on cotton and sugarcane plantations.
Certainly these facts must color our understanding of the appeal of Johnson's painting, as well as the evolution of its public reception. Why did collectors buy works like Negro Life at the South, and how were these purchases manifested in the public self-image of their owners? Lesley Carol Wright, in a probing study of the collecting of American genre paintings during the second half of the nineteenth century, sees a pattern of self-representation and identification in the buying habits of the patrons - wealthy New York businessmen for the most part - whom she considers. "The religious, familial, commercial, historical and patriotic values of an individual could all be codified by the evolving complex that was the collector's art collection," she writes. The paintings, individually and in the aggregate, form "a cumulative portrait of the man - a studied projection of how he wants to appear to the world."(71)
