Art: Two Centuries of Stereotypes

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Not until Homer's Dressing for the Carnival, 1877 -- beyond comparison the most moving and solidly imagined painting in the show -- were the subtlety, sympathy and fullness of Copley's rendering repeated. Nevertheless, there are times when McElroy's prosecutorial zeal gets away from him. Samuel Jennings' Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, 1792, may be a naive image, but no one could doubt that its heart is in the right place. It shows the Goddess of Freedom in her temple offering the emblems of civilization -- books, an artist's palette, a lyre, a globe and, most important of all, a broken chain -- to a group of grateful freed slaves, while in the background more blacks celebrate a liberty pole. McElroy complains that the artist "avoids presenting images that describe individual black people": none of the black figures is a portrait. But so what? There is no individual white person in the painting either, except for a bronze bust of the abolitionist Henry Thornton; the goddess Liberty, far from being "a white noblewoman," is a standard allegorical figure.

Likewise, McElroy notes with disapproval that in Eakins' Will Schuster and Blackman Going Shooting (Rail Shooting), 1876, the hunter with the gun in the boat is named while the black guide with the pole is not. But a title is not a picture, and in the painting itself Eakins has taken scrupulous care with the guide's face, posture, attentiveness -- all that describes a skilled man at work. If we think Eakins meant "Blackman" as a cipher, we are off the mark.

Alexander Pushkin in Russia and Alexandre Dumas in France boasted of their African ancestry; one cannot imagine an American writer or artist having done so. But the relative poverty of images of blacks in American painting was also largely caused by different conditions of work. Patronage in the U.S. was thin. Artists had to scramble for portrait commissions, which few blacks could afford to give them. But there were perfectly dignified, solid, objective portraits by white artists of black clients such as the Pennsylvania clergyman Absolom Jones by Raphaelle Peale before 1810, or Elisha Hammond's 1844 portrait of the young Frederick Douglass, neither of which is in this show. On the other hand, unlike France or even England, young America had no real market for "philosophical" pictures in which blacks might figure -- allegories of freedom, brotherhood and the like.

What the American market mainly wanted before the Civil War was genre scenes of American life, which might or might not include blacks. Most American genre painting before Homer and Eakins was lowbrow stuff, in which blacks tended to get the roles played by the fiddling boors and carousing peasants in Dutch genre. They become lazy Sambos with watermelons, fiddling clowns, butts of practical jokes. But not all the time. "Sambo is not my man and brother," snorted William Makepeace Thackeray during his lecture tour of America in 1852-53. Yet when his secretary, Eyre Crowe, painted a group of black women and a field hand waiting to be auctioned in Virginia, the image was all sympathy and respect, without a trace of his employer's bigotry.