Title: The planter's prospect : privilege and slavery in plantation paintings /
Authors: Vlach, John Michael, 1948-
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press,
Year: 2002
Subjects: Landscape painting, American Southern States; Landscape painting, American Southern States; Plantation life in art.; Black people in art
Abstract: "When nineteenth-century artists painted plantation scenes, they usually began with preparatory sketches made while standing in front of a planter's house or somewhere slightly below it. From either position, notes John Vlach, their gaze - and that of anyone who looked at the finished paintings - was necessarily directed upward. Instead of following the common compositional rule for landscape painting that called for a view from above, an outlook that fostered a feeling of mastery in the viewer, artists rendering plantation vistas employed a perspective that echoed the deference and respect the planter class assumed was its due."
Contents: Plantation images: the contours of practice -- Proofs of power: the Maryland estate paintings of Francis Guy -- Beauty without bondsmen: low-country scenes from Charles Fraser's sketchbook -- Meticulous renderings of tranquility: Adrien Persac's plantation watercolors -- Mrs. Palmer's cabin: the South according to Currier & Ives -- A not so sunny South: William Aiken Walker's planatation paintings -- Veiled in memories: Alice Ravenel Huger Smith's rice plantation series -- Controlled with a paintbrush: black figures in plantation paintings.