The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings - Softcover

Vlach, John Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807853526 ISBN 13: 9780807853528

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

"[An] insightful new study of the perspective of landscape illustrators [on] southern plantations between the years 1800 and 1950. . . . Like the works of the commercial and romantic illustrators, these are paintings by and for an elite whose wealth belied the cruelty and racism of the system that fashioned it. They are the products of the gaze of both northern and southern elites, equally uninterested in the perspective of the plantation workers or their material world."-- Civil War Book Review

About the Author:

John Michael Vlach is professor of American studies and anthropology at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. His previous books include Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery and Plain Painters: Making Sense of American Folk Art.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0807853526
• ISBN 13: 9780807853528
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240