Eastman Johnson's 'Negro Life at the South' and urban slavery in Washington, D.C

In an era when the social history of art has more or less become common academic currency, such intuitive assertions about art collectors and their connection to their works might almost be taken as a given, at least in the abstract. Yet it could also be argued that New York merchants bought pictures for a variety of reasons, that not every purchase - particularly when it came to collectors who amassed as many works as Wright and Stuart - need be tied inescapably to their personal, social, and political philosophies. In the case-by-case examination of selected collectors and paintings, however, these otherwise broad statements concerning patron motivation can indeed take on meaning; the nuances of the process of acquisition emerge and the patterns linking buyers of the same temperament become apparent. I would argue that in this instance, during the contentious years surrounding the Civil War, we find a charged subject, African American slave imagery, and a picture, the most famous genre painting of its day, that would have necessarily demanded a positioned response from nearly every viewer. And when the viewer becomes the owner of the work, and when the owner happens to owe his success to his extremely active commercial involvement with the slave power, the stakes of interpretation, both public and private, are raised very high indeed.

Lesley Wright takes as one of her patron subjects Robert Stuart, the second owner of Negro Life at the South, and outlines a long-standing fascination on his part with African American imagery of a particular type. As early as 1858, Stuart had demonstrated his interest in black subjects by attempting to purchase Thomas Waterman Wood's Moses, the Baltimore News Vendor [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED], exhibited that year at the National Academy. Through a misunderstanding, however, the painting had been promised to another collector as well - John Brune, of Baltimore, a sugar refiner like Stuart who also made a specialty of African American genre subjects. Incredibly, the ensuing conflict over this seventy-five-dollar painting escalated to a lawsuit between the two collectors, a battle that Stuart lost, leaving him, nonetheless, with a copy of the Wood painting by James Cafferty (1860, New-York Historical Society) as recompense.

The painting desired by these unusually tenacious sugar magnates was actually a portrait of a well-known Baltimore personage, Moses Small, but in a revealing parallel with Negro Life at the South, this newspaper salesman's specific identity was soon dropped from the title and the several press reviews of the work. What was left was a nondescript, deferential, "feel-good" African American type, that of a successful but nonthreatening free black entrepreneur who was eager to serve. When grouped with Stuart's other paintings of African Americans (the most important of which was Negro Life at the South), a racial group portrait emerges, in Lesley Wright's words, of "well-mannered and thoughtful African Americans, who depended on white society for their livelihood, their home, or their dreams of a future but who nevertheless managed to establish a bit of independence and dignity." We see Stuart, then, going significantly out of his way and spending large amounts of money (at $6,000, Negro Life at the South was over twice as expensive as any of his previous purchases) to associate himself with an image of blacks who are comfortable and do not suffer but who also do not challenge the authority of whites. Yet, as Wright notes, his interest in African Americans did not extend so far as supporting the cause of abolition during the years leading up to the Civil War (although, like most New York businessmen, he became an ardent unionist once the conflict had begun). In all respects, then, Stuart remained in territory that was not only safe but that also reflected well on someone whose fortunes were so closely tied to the hard labor of African Americans. His purchases, especially when exhibited and made available to the public, became a kind of policy statement on the "natural" state of the races and the desirability of maintaining the status quo.(72)