Abolitionist Places by Martha Schoolman Jared Hickman

Author:Martha Schoolman, Jared Hickman [Martha Schoolman, Jared Hickman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317976936
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

The travelling artist

Artists who wished to travel had once been largely associated with scientific and exploratory expeditions, and their engraved plates in atlases and other descriptive travel books thus tended to follow the conventions of natural history art. Such artists included John White (fl. 1585–93), who was one of the first English artists to paint North American scenes; William Hodges (1744–97) and John Webber (1751–93), who accompanied Captain James Cook on his second and third Pacific voyages; and Jacques Étienne Victor Arago (1790–1854), who travelled on Louis de Freycinet’s round-the-world voyage of 1817 to 1820.5

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the market for empirical knowledge of the New World was expanding well beyond the exclusive preserve of the scientific community; a growing middle class with increased time for leisure was eager for words and pictures recorded by “on the spot” witnesses.6 The rise of books of voyages and travels mirrored the expansion of European commercial and colonial interests.7 At the same time, an increasing number of European artists were inspired by a Humboldtian imperative that propelled them beyond the traditional Continental itinerary of the grand tour. Independent travel was becoming easier and some cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, were opening up their ports to foreign visitors for the first time. Artists such as Englishmen Augustus Earle and Charles Landseer (1799–1879), German-born Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–58) and their French counterpart Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768–1848), all lived and painted in Rio de Janeiro in the 1820s. Others, such as Englishmen William Berryman (d. c.1816) and Richard Bridgens (1785–1846), lived in the British West Indies in the early decades of the nineteenth century, while Belgian artist Pierre Jacques Benoit (1782–1854) lived and painted in Surinam during the 1830s.8 All viewed the New World as a boundless source of fresh material that could potentially bring them recognition and success back home. Images by such artists filtered into European consciousness in a variety of forms. These ranged from oil paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon, and watercolours shown by the burgeoning societies devoted to the medium, to individual prints displayed and sold by dealers, and those published in books.9 Images of slavery – including those with abolitionist intent – appeared in all these forms, although most commonly in printed books and watercolours.

Unlike those artists remaining in the metropole whose pictures of the enslaved were derived from second-hand sources, travelling artists (and their audiences) believed strongly in the evidential value of their images, a value attributed to their global mobility. In European Encounters with the New World (1993), Anthony Pagden discusses the epistemological authority of first-hand experience that characterized many early European texts on travel to the New World. “[A]uthority could only be guaranteed (if at all),” he writes, “by an appeal to the authorial voice. It is the ‘I’ who has seen what no other being has seen, who alone is capable of giving credibility to the text.”10 This privileging of the testimony of the eyewitness – what Pagden

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