painting art gallery

Jumat, 03 Juni 2011

Free Black Men and Women in Maryland

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Free Blacks in Maryland

From the seventeenth century on there was a growing free black population in Maryland. This population grew quickly in the antebellum years. African Americans were usually emancipated for diligent work, good conduct, familial connections, or commendable service. At other times white owners experienced a change of heart, an attack of conscience, or, in the case of Quaker meetings, freed their slaves in following their religion.

The methods for manumission in Maryland included court actions, instructions in owners' wills, self-purchase, purchase of one's own family member's freedom with money earned when hired out, governmental decrees, or rewards for military service. In Maryland, according to acts of 1697 and 1692, the law declared that children followed the condition of their mother. Thus, when children were born to a free mother, they were free also.

In 1752, the population of Baltimore County included 166 mulatto slaves, 96 free mulattoes, 4,027 black slaves and eight free blacks. The census of 1790 recorded that about eight thousand free blacks lived in the state at that time. The free black population was concentrated in northern and western Maryland.

In 1830, the free black population was just under 53,000, about 12 percent of Maryland's population, according to the U.S. Census. That meant that about one-third of the entire Maryland African American population in Maryland was free.

Free blacks generally were not accorded the same privileges as white citizens. Maryland changed its laws relating to free blacks depending on the political climate. For a brief period some free blacks had the right to vote, but the law was later rescinded. Blacks could not carry firearms or testify against whites in court.

Free blacks—especially children—lived under the threat of being beaten or kidnapped by whites who would sell them into slavery. One reason whites formed the Maryland Abolition Society was to try to protect free blacks from kidnappers. Maryland passed and repealed several laws prohibiting blacks from assembling or carrying firearms. Maryland county governments often vacillated about the right of free blacks to hold and bequeath property. Whites often sought to restrict the type of work blacks could do because they did not want to compete with them. At various times the Maryland Assembly tried to pass laws prohibiting blacks from reading abolitionist literature, operating boats, obtaining licenses for pedaling, participating in certain trades, or having or driving hacks, carts or drays. There was also an effort keep free blacks from owning dogs. Slaveholders' motive for many of the laws, particularly those prohibiting free blacks from owning conveyances, was to prevent them from aiding runaway slaves.

In spite of numerous restrictions, free blacks in Maryland formed their own churches, schools, benevolent societies, and businesses. By 1847 there were at least thirteen black churches in Baltimore alone. Many churches were a part of larger denominations which met periodically in various states to discuss both religious and political matters.

The 1850 Census indicates that over 50 percent of Maryland free blacks could read and/or write. Free persons of color worked as domestics, small farmers, innkeepers, street vendors, ship caulkers, stevedores, sailors and boatmen, draymen, barbers, teamsters, blacksmiths, and liverymen. Blacks who had purchased their freedom were usually able to do so because they had earned money with their skilled labor.

Some free blacks, like astronomer Benjamin Banneker and preacher Daniel Coker, were able to record their own experiences. Banneker published an almanac and aided in the survey of the Federal District, later to become the District of Columbia. Coker became one of the first emigrants to return to Africa with the American Colonization Society.

Written by Debra Newman Ham for the Maryland Online Encyclopedia.
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Civil War Life

Washington, District of Columbia. Tent life of the 31st Penn. Infantry (later, 82d Penn. Inf.) at Queen's farm, vicinity of Fort Slocum

Kamis, 02 Juni 2011

Robinson Elliott - School Time

http://www.artprints.org.uk/Portrait-Art-Prints/c5/p18/School-Time-by-Robinson-Elliott/product_info.html

Albert Joseph Moore - Charity

CARITAS (CHARITY)
signed with an anthemion l.r.
coloured pastels on grey paper
130 by 56cm., 51 by 22in.

Lot Sold. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 85,250 GBP

The present drawing was apparently based upon a design for a memorial window and depicts a mother in classical robes accompanied by children. It has been dated to c.1890 and is a beautiful example of Moore's later work. The pastel is similar to a group of drawings owned by the famous department store founder Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty (sold in these rooms, 6 October 1980, lots 61-64). Pastel was a medium that Moore used increasingly in later years with great expression as Robyn Asleson has explained; 'Lending itself to subtle nuance, pastel moderated Moore's
rigorously analytical approach to composition. The female body, which he had long endeavoured to render dispassionately, attained greater sensuality in his last works.' (Robyn Asleson, Albert Moore, 2000, p.193) These drawings were not mere studies and have an intensity of their own and depict delicate subjects of human emotion;

'Intimations of love and affection merely hinted at in earlier compositions became overt themes in Moore's later pastels and related works. The bond between mother and child provided the subject of Caritas, a nearly life-size pastel...' (op. cit) It is possible that Caritas owes elements of its composition and subject to a painting of the same title by Edward Burne-Jones completed in 1885 (collection of Lord Lloyd Webber), particularly the naked child held in the mother's arms and the older child half-hidden behind her robes.

John Atkinson Grimshaw - An Autumn Lane

signed and dated l.r.: Atkinson Grimshaw 1886+
oil on canvas
76 by 64cm., 30 by 25in

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, John Atkinson Grimshaw painted a series of views of deserted suburban streets in London and Yorkshire. These images of a solitary female figure, making her way down a leaf and puddle strewn road, are perhaps the most emotive and typical of the artist, who was unrivalled in his depiction of the evening
gloaming and the dawning morn. Whether he was painting suburban roads, the docks at Whitby and Liverpool or the shopping streets of Leeds; busy and noisy places during the day, Grimshaw painted the silent solitary evening still, when the residents, dock-workers and shop assistants return home, leaving the streets deserted. The horses and carts, which have left their impressions in the damp soil of the road, have long since departed and the gateways have been closed to the outside world. There is an emotive sense of stillness and calm which pervades these golden images of evening light.

An Autumn Lane depicts the same view with the same house, but lit by the glow of the dawn, rather than the moonlit sky. The view has not been identified and it has been suggested that it is an amalgam of views in North Yorkshire, rather than a specific identifiable location. As Alexander Robinson states, 'Just as myth and legend were
to be plundered for subjects, so actual and historical houses could be put together to form an archetypical mansion'.

However the same house appears in many pictures by the artist and it is likely that it did exist, probably in one of the suburbs of Leeds, where the artist often painted. The house features prominently in A Yorkshire House' of 1878 (Harrogate Museums and Art Gallery), A Golden Idyll (sold in these rooms, 12 December 1997, lot 181), Gold of Autumn (sold in these rooms, 6 November 1995, lot 199), An Autumn Lane and related pictures. These series of pictures recall the lines of Lord Alfred Tennyson's Enoch Arden;

'The small house,
The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes,
The peacock-yew tree and the lonely Hall...
The chill November dawns and dewy-glooming downs,
The gentle shower, the smell of the dying leaves...'

In 1885 Grimshaw had temporarily entered London society, moving firstly into a hotel on The Strand and later to a studio on Manresa Road in Chelsea. It is possible that it was in Chelsea that he painted An Autumn Lane and it is tempting to speculate that the scene is at least partly based on one of the streets of Chelsea or Battersea, which were lined with mansions surrounded by high walls and with rows of looming birch and plane trees. However, the house itself was almost certainly based upon the artist's studies made earlier in the 1880s in Yorkshire. Around the
time this picture was painted, Grimshaw was a good friend of the other great Victorian painter of noctures, James Abbot McNeill Whistler, who lived a short walk across Chelsea Bridge. Whistler greatly admired Grimshaw's moonlit scenes and there was a genuine admiration between the two artists.

Although Grimshaw was inspired by the modernism of industrial dockyards and the lamplit city commercialism, he was also a great admirer of the crumbling heritage of England, with a deep love for Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture. Amongst the items which remained in his estate when he died, were a handful of his most precious
books, including A History of Hardwick Hall of 1835. Grimshaw painted many street scenes in which beautiful ancient houses stand hauntingly silent, bathed in the golden dawn light and surrounded by birch trees stripped bare by the approaching winter.

Painted with a limited palette of malachite, gold and russet, with a meticulous attention to detail, Grimshaw created an image which is powerfully romantic and yet wholly realistic. This picture is a radiant painting by Grimshaw in which his characteristic verdegris night sky is replaced by a wonderfully luminous morning glow. An Autumn Lane is one of Grimshaw's most important canvases of the series.