Philip Spiess
And another installment in CINCINNATI’S AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY: Part III: “Two African-American Artists of Cincinnati”:
Robert S. Duncanson: So far, because of slavery and race riots and such, I have evoked a rather grim picture of the life and role of African-Americans in Cincinnati in the 19th century. So let us turn to the arts for a more upbeat portrayal. Robert Seldon Duncanson (1821-1872), born in Seneca County, New York, was the son of John Dean Duncanson, a free black tradesman; his father, Charles Duncanson, was a former slave from Virginia who was freed by his owner. Because Charles received special privileges, such as learning a skilled trade (in his case, carpentry and house painting) and eventually his emancipation, it is likely that he was the illegitimate son of his owner. As opposition grew toward freed black men in the upper South at the end of the 18th century, Charles, his son James, and his son’s wife, Lucy Nickles, moved north. They settled in Fayette, New York, where Robert was born. The skills of the grandfather were passed down to the father, and eventually to the son, and in 1828, after the death of Charles, the family moved to Monroe, Michigan, then a “boomtown.”
Here John Dean Duncanson found considerable success as a house painter and carpenter, and, in due course, his son Robert and Robert’s four brothers were apprenticed to the trades of house painting and carpentry, Robert emerging as the most talented of his siblings. And so, in 1838, Robert established a painting business with a partner, John Gamblin, but in 1839 he suspended the business in order to pursue his ambition as a portrait painter. Therefore, in 1840, Robert Duncanson left Michigan and moved to Mount Healthy, Ohio, north of Cincinnati, to begin a career in the fine arts.
The community of Mount Healthy, like Cincinnati at the time, which had a black population of around 3,000 (who often referred to Cincinnati as the “emporium of the West” because it had greater opportunities for economic advancement for African-Americans than elsewhere), had a substantial population of free blacks, often former slaves, who were attracted to the Cincinnati area as being a “southern town” on free soil. However, Duncanson also was attracted to the city because of its strong arts community (after the Civil War, Cincinnati was often referred to as “the Athens of the West” and “the Paris of America”). In the 19th century, Cincinnati was a mecca for prominent landscape artists, among them Godfrey Frankenstein, William Louis Sonntag, Worthington Whittredge – and eventually Robert Duncanson himself – all of them still recognized by art historians as important American artists of the 19th century.
Although Robert Duncanson had no formal art training, he taught himself by copying engravings of European works and by sketching from nature; he also worked on painting portraits. Traveling between Cincinnati, Detroit, and Monroe, Michigan, he worked as an itinerant portrait painter (as did, let us note, many another African-American artist). His first datable work, 1841, is “Portrait of a Mother and Daughter.” By 1842, Duncanson had three more portraits: “Miser,” “Fancy Portrait,” and “Infant Savior (a copy),” which were accepted for the second exhibition of the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts. Historical speculation suggests that, because of his race, Duncanson was not allowed to take classes at the Academy, although he was allowed to exhibit his work in the show; indeed, his mother, who was not permitted to attend the exhibition because of race, supposedly said about the paintings, “I know what they look like . . . . I know that they are there! That’s the important thing.” [N.B.: The Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts was established in 1828 – and promptly went pfftt!: it couldn’t even pay for candles and the doorman at its first – and only – exhibition. Resurrected in 1838, this was the group under which Duncanson exhibited. It finally got a new foothold in 1868 as the Art Academy of Cincinnati, moved to its quarters next to the Cincinnati Art Museum in Eden Park (ca. 1884-1887), and separated from the Cincinnati Museum Association in 1998 to move to new quarters on Jackson Street in the “Over-the-Rhine” district in 2005.]
Around this time (1844), Duncanson began working with a photographer named Coates, with whom he produced a series of “Chemical Paintings. . . comprising four splendid views after the singular style of Daguerre” [see also his work with Ball, below]. However, work was sparse, so in the period 1845-1846, Duncanson was working primarily in Detroit, painting portraits. But he also took up genre painting through his connection with the Cincinnati painter James H. Beard.
In 1846, Duncanson returned to Cincinnati and turned his full-time interest to landscape painting. He received a commission (1848) from Methodist minister Charles Avery, an Abolitionist, for whom he painted “Cliff Mine, Lake Superior,” which helped solidify his career as a landscape painter and which established him among Abolitionist patrons, ones who would support him throughout his career. They provided him with commissions, purchased his paintings, and financed some of his travels to other locations, both in this country and abroad, as well as introducing him to other prominent people in the art community, all of this proving that African-Americans had the ability to viably participate in mainstream culture. On top of this, abolitionists would also commission artistic works with racial themes in order to advance the antislavery cause. In short, Cincinnati, with a substantial black population and a strong abolitionist presence, was an obvious place for an African-American to seek out a living in the fine arts.
Duncanson was intrigued by landscape painting, studying prints in published travel accounts, especially those in Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan (an examination of Mayan ruins by John Lloyd Stephens; illustrations by Frederick Catherwood; 1843). The artistic community in Cincinnati at this time was excited by and inspired by the so-called “Hudson River School” of artists, headed by Thomas Cole (not an actual school, but a style) [I’ll write another time about Cole’s famous larger set of four paintings, known as “The Voyage of Life” (he also did a smaller set, which is in the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York), which hung in the art gallery of George K. Schoenberger’s “Scarlet Oaks” mansion in Clifton until they were sold, through Francis Dale, publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer and a supporter of Richard Nixon, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., in the early 1970s]. Thus the local artists at that time took sketching trips of landscapes around the country; by the early 1850s, Duncanson was focusing his work on the Ohio River valley, infusing his Romantic landscapes with literary allusions. One such work, from 1851, was “Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Miami River.” In 1853, Duncanson took the “required” “Grand Tour” of Europe and its art galleries, which provided inspiration for his future landscape works. In 1861, Duncanson painted what many consider his greatest work: “Land of the Lotus Eaters,” based on the well-known poem, “The Lotos-Eaters” (with its “Choric Song”; 1833; altered, 1842), by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Duncanson took the painting to Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight, England (“Farringford,” now a hotel, which I have visited), in order to show it to him. Tennyson’s delighted response was “Your landscape is a land in which one loves to wander and linger.” (The painting is currently in the Swedish Royal Collection, Stockholm.)
Another of Duncanson’s significant works, commissioned by the outspoken Abolitionist minister and newspaper editor, Rev. James Francis Conover, is “Uncle Tom and Little Eva” (1853; now in the Detroit Institute of Arts), based upon a scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin [see previous installment, Part II, on the “Underground Railroad”]. Uncle Tom, the novel’s eponymous protagonist, a black slave, and Little Eva, the white daughter of a slave owner, are looking upward to heaven on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain (Louisiana); the scene relates to salvation from slavery through spiritual love and sacrifice.
But perhaps the currently best-known work of Robert Duncanson in Cincinnati is his series of murals painted for Nicholas Longworth, then Cincinnati’s richest businessman, in his Lytle Park mansion “Belmont” (now known as the Taft Museum of Art), as Longworth considered Duncanson “one of our most promising painters.” Circa 1851, Duncanson created eight murals for the entryway of Longworth’s house, depicting landscapes of what was then the American “West.” For many years these murals, which were later covered by wallpaper, were hidden and unknown, until being rediscovered during the restoration of the house in 1931 (converting it into the Taft Museum); they were restored in 1931-1932.
In 1854, Robert Duncanson began working in the photographic studio of James Pressley Ball [see below], retouching portraits and coloring photographs. The next year (1855), Ball and Duncanson created a huge anti-slavery panoramic painting [described below], for which Duncanson did the landscape sections.
When the Civil War broke out, Duncanson emigrated to Canada, settling in Montreal in 1863. Inspired by the natural landscapes of Canada, and accepted into the Montreal art community, he, in turn, influenced Canadian painting of this period. But in the winter of 1866-1867, the Civil War over, Duncanson returned to Cincinnati, at this time painting many scenes of Scottish landscapes, which he had toured during his Canadian years. One such was his painting “Ellen’s Isle, Loch Katrine” (1871), a painting inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s long narrative poem, The Lady of the Lake (1810).
Unfortunately, in the final years of his life, Duncanson developed dementia – quite possibly from lead poisoning in his paints (this still occasionally occurs today; I’ve had friends in the museum profession who have died from the chemicals involved in conservation work); his often erratic behavior began to disturb his patrons. He began to believe in spiritualism and thought that he was possessed by a master painter. Finally, in 1872, he suffered a seizure while setting up an exhibition in Detroit and died there on December 21; he is buried in Monroe, Michigan. He is credited with developing an “Ohio Valley School” version of the “Hudson River School” of landscape painting. In 1972, the Cincinnati Art Museum held a major exhibition, "Robert S. Duncanson: A Centennial Exhibition," and in 1986, the Taft Museum established an artist-in-residence program for contemporary African-American artists in honor of Robert Duncanson.
[Laura Reid Pease may be able to add to this portrait of Duncanson, but also see Joseph D. Ketner: The Emergence of the African-American Artist: Robert S. Duncanson, 1821-1872 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1993).]
James Pressley [or Presley] Ball: But landscape painting was not the only art for which Cincinnati was known in the 19th century. Despite the fact that some artists ridiculed the new technique of photographics as a “foe-to-graphics,” Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre’s invention of 1839, the “daguerreotype” photograph, caught on in the “Queen City” and it became a center of this rising art and trade. One of the first persons to open a daguerreotype studio in Cincinnati was James Pressley Ball (1825-1904), born in Frederick County, Virginia, to William and Susan Ball. At an early age he learned daguerreotype photography from John B. Bailey of Boston, who, like Ball, was “a freeman of color.” At the age of 20, Ball opened a one-room daguerreotype studio in Cincinnati, but at this early stage of the art it did not prosper, so Ball went on the road as an itinerant daguerreotypist, moving briefly to Pittsburgh, then to Richmond, Virginia, in 1846. But in 1847, traveling still as an itinerant daguerreotypist, Ball headed back to Ohio.
Ball settled once again in Cincinnati in 1849 and opened a photographic studio with his brother, Thomas Ball, who became a photographic operative for his brother. The gallery / studio, known as “Ball’s Daguerrean Gallery of the West” or “Ball’s Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West,” began as a small gallery (as they all were in those days), but quickly grew to be one of the great galleries – if not the greatest daguerreotype gallery – of the Midwest. In May, 1854, Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion published a handsome woodcut of Ball’s main gallery and described it as displaying 187 photographs by Ball and six paintings by Robert Duncanson [see above], who worked in Ball’s studio (starting in 1854 until about 1858) retouching portraits and coloring photographic prints. Gleason’s further stated that the gallery was “replete with elegance and beauty,” with walls “bordered with gold leaf and flowers,” “master-piece” furniture, a piano, and large mirrors. [I first came across the Gleason’s woodcut of Ball’s Cincinnati gallery in one of my books on Victoriana when I was still a student at Walnut Hills High School, and have seen it reproduced numerous times since in other books on the Victorian period and on photography, but it was only recently that I learned that James Ball was an African-American – for the simple reason that none of the books ever mentioned it (if they ever knew it)!]
Ball also opened the separate Ball and Thomas Gallery with his brother-in-law, Alexander Thomas. In 1855, James Ball produced one of his most dramatic works: a 600-yard-long panoramic painting (it was the age of panoramas and cycloramas; one of this length was, I suspect, mounted on rollers, as many were, being called "moving panoramas," and last used as backgrounds in early motion pictures) entitled “Ball’s Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States, Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade, of Northern and Southern Cities; of Cotton and Sugar Plantations; of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Susquehanna Rivers, Niagara Falls, &c.” Duncanson probably participated in the production of the painting, which was produced to accompany an Abolitionist pamphlet published by Ball (same title; Cincinnati: Achilles Pugh, 1855). Also during 1855, Ball’s daguerreotypes were shown at the Ohio State Fair and at the Ohio Mechanics’ Institute’s annual fair [for information on this latter fair, see my Master’s thesis, 1970, on “The Cincinnati Industrial Expositions”], and in 1856 Ball traveled to Europe. But, alas! In May of 1860, a tornado destroyed the Ball and Thomas Gallery, although it was later rebuilt with assistance from the community.
It is unclear what happened (if anything; possibly Reconstruction in the South) at this juncture, but by the 1870s Ball had ended his partnership with Thomas, and had moved subsequently first to Greenville, Mississippi, then to Vidalia, Louisiana, then to St. Louis, and then to Minneapolis, where he opened a new studio. By 1887, the studio was known as “J. P. Ball & Son, Artistic Photographers” (Ball’s son was James Pressley Ball, Jr.). In September of this year, Ball was appointed the official photographer of the 25th anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Nevertheless, in October of 1887 Ball moved again, to Helena, Montana, establishing another photographic studio there. By 1894, Ball had become active in Helena politics, although he declined the position of county coroner, for which he had been nominated (a case, no doubt, of “Not over anybody’s dead body!”). One of the series of photographs Ball took at this time was of William Biggerstaff, an African-American, portraying him before, during, and after he was hanged in 1896 for committing murder! (Well, okay, maybe over at least one dead body). Then, in 1900, the Ball family moved to Seattle, where Ball opened the Globe Photo Studio; he may have moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1901. The Ball family moved to Honolulu in 1902, where Ball died in 1904.
Among the celebrities of the Victorian period who were photographed by James P. Ball, mostly as daguerreotypes but also as albumen prints (i.e., cartes de visite) were these: Charles Dickens; P. T. Barnum; Jenny Lind; Frederick Douglass; Ulysses Grant and family; Henry Garnet; and Queen Victoria herself. As a marker of the significance of Ball’s work, in 1992 the Swann Galleries sold an 1851 daguerreotype by Ball of three storefronts in Cincinnati for $63,800, thus setting a world record for the highest price paid at auction for a daguerreotype photograph! And in 2010, the Cincinnati Historical Society mounted an exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center, “An American Journey: The Life and Photography of James Presley Ball,” the first extensive display of Ball’s photographic work (the Cincinnati Historical Society holds the nation’s largest collection of images, over 400, by Ball and his partners).
[For further information on Ball, see Deborah Willis: J. P. Ball, Daguerrean and Studio Photographer (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993).]
Part IV: “Allen Temple: Its Pastors and Its Influence” will be posted soon.
[to be continued]
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