The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Planation Paintings

Abstract

The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings. By John Michael Vlach. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. x, 216. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $24.95.)Rhys Isaac's pathbreaking study of The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1982) demonstrated that, in decades surrounding American Revolution, southern aristocrats expressed their eminence through elevation of their houses. These patriarchs constructed their dwellings in positions of prominence, centered high above kitchens, barns, smoke houses, slave quarters, and other dependencies peopled by supposed social inferiors who-literally and figuratively-had to look up to them. In subsequent years, as John Michael Vlach contends in The Planter's Prospect, southern aristocrats projected their dominance not only through architecture but also through art.During first half of nineteenth century, Vlach argues, artists worked to reinforce physical and social elevation of plantation houses (and their genteel inhabitants) by painting them from lowly vantage points and rendering as seen by an upturned face, one that implicitly signaled submission and respect (1). While antebellum plantation images usually excluded enslaved individuals in order to whitewash realities of southern life, works of postbellum art appropriated blacks for same purpose. After Civil War, they cast a filmy screen over a lost and presumably heroic world (177) by portraying African Americans engaged in joyous dancing and singing, acts that confirmed what many of slavery's defenders had claimed all along: that slaves were well cared for and quite contented with their fates (186).Vlach's wonderfully well-written book uses art to corroborate, in a visually stunning fashion, conventional historiographical wisdom that elite southern whites used all means at their disposal to perpetuate their dominance. It also provides readers with perceptive analyses of of artists such as Francis Guy, Charles Fraser, Adrien Persac, Frances Flora Bond Palmer, William Aiken Walker, and Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, as well as firm of Nathaniel Currier and James Edmund Ives. To better serve their clients, Vlach demonstrates, many of these painters and lithographers broke rules of day. While nineteenth-century American landscape artists normally surveyed countryside from a high vantage point, giving viewers of their works feelings of mastery, prior to Civil War many of artists he surveys bucked trend in deference to mastery of their patrons. Thus some of these artists looked over (and overlooked) fields and slaves that served as bases of plantation economy while others followed lead of Fraser, who gravitated toward a more panoramic view that included fields but thoroughly eliminated black people from his renderings (87).Vlach calls readers' attention not only to what (and who) is not pictured in plantation artwork but also to what is. A number of antebellum plantation artists framed scenes of leisure within broader panorama of southern life. Enslaved people were similarly excluded or marginalized, but less disingenuously and more by ingenious choices of setting. Witness Jane Pitford Braddick Peticolas's View of West Front of Monticello (1825), which was one of the great majority of nineteenth-century plantation paintings that depicted not landscapes but more tightly-focused house portraits, images in which more mundane elements such as fields, crops, livestock, and farming work were excluded (11). …