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Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art

Bridging art history and social history, Landscape of Slavery undertakes an original study of plantation images from the eighteenth century through the present to unravel the realities and mythology inherent in this complex and often provocative subject. Through eighty-three color plates, nineteen black-and-white illustrations, and six thematic essays, the collection examines depictions of plantation structures, plantation views, and related slave imagery and art in the context of the American landscape tradition, addressing the impact of these works on race relations in the United States. Created by artists as diverse as Thomas Coram, Louis Remy Mignot, Dave "The Potter" Drake, Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Thomas Hart Benton, Hale Woodruff, Aaron Douglas, Juan Logan, Joyce Scott, Carrie Mae Weems, Radcliffe Bailey, and Kara Walker, the wide range of objects discussed includes paintings, drawings, photographs, statuary, ceramics, and items of folk art.
A genre predominantly tied to the American South, the plantation view has received slight attention in the study of American landscape art. Regarded by art historians as derivative of the early-eighteenth-century British estate view, the plantation image straddles the aesthetic boundary between topographical depiction and landscape painting. In recent years, however, plantation views have increasingly attracted the attention of social and cultural historians who have identified the genre as a rich source for exploring themes of wealth, power, race, memory, nostalgia, and conflict. Landscape of Slavery provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of the aesthetic motives and social uses of this art in the shaping of Southern history and culture. The contributors analyze depictions of white dominion, Southern affluence, and the idealizing nostalgia of the post-Civil War era as well as the black aesthetic that has developed as a dissident counterpoint to this tradition.
Serving as a companion to a traveling exhibit of the same name, the volume includes a foreword by Todd D. Smith, executive director of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina; an introduction by editor and chief curator Angela D. Mack; and essays by John Michael Vlach, Roberta Sokolitz, Leslie King-Hammond, Maurie D. McInnis, Alexis L. Boylan, and Michael D. Harris.

Rosedown Plantation was founded by Daniel and Martha Turnbull after they got back from their European honeymoon in 1834. Martha Turnbull brought back with her many plant samples and statues from a variety of places in Europe. She created one of the most extensive plantation gardens at 28 acres with one side of the allee in the English Picturesque style and the other side of the allee in the French manner. The house is basically in the Federal style with Greek Revival additions such as the two-story front porch and side wings. The plantation is worth the tour just for the garden alone. Rosedown Plantation is on the National Register #01000765, and is also a National Historic Landmark.

Behind plantation style shutters, The Foundry Classic is a gracious, Southern haven that sets the standard for luxurious accommodations, welcoming amenities and the latest technology to suit your every need.

Although nineteenth-century American landscapes typically were painted from a high vantage point, looking down from above, southern landscapes that featured plantations diverged from this convention in telling ways. Portraits of planters' landholdings were often depicted from a point below the plantation house, a perspective that directs the viewer's gaze upward and, as John Vlach observes, echoes the deference and respect the planter class assumed was its due. Moreover, Vlach notes, slaves were rarely represented in plantation paintings made before the Civil War, although it was slave labor that powered the plantation system. After the war and the abolition of slavery, he argues, a wistful revisionism seems to have restored these people--still toiling in the service of the masters--to the landscapes they had created and on which they were so cruelly mistreated.
This richly illustrated book explores the statements of power and ironic evasions encoded in plantation landscapes, focusing on six artists whose collective body of work spans the period between 1800 and 1935 and documents plantations across the South, from Maryland to Louisiana: Francis Guy, Charles Fraser, Adrien Persac, Currier & Ives chief artist Fanny Palmer, William Aiken Walker, and Alice Ravenel Huger Smith.