The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings

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Description

Even though nineteenth-century American landscapes usually were painted from a high vantage point, having a look down from above, southern landscapes that featured plantations diverged from this convention in telling ways. Portraits of planters’ landholdings were frequently depicted from a point below the plantation house, a standpoint that directs the viewer’s gaze upward and, as John Vlach observes, echoes the deference and respect the planter class assumed was once its due. Additionally, Vlach notes, slaves were rarely represented in plantation paintings made before the Civil War, Even though it was once 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 within 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, specializing in six artists whose collective body of work spans the period between 1800 and 1935 and documents plantations around 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.

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