The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation 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, acknowledgements, introduction, illustrations, photographs, notes, index. $49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper); Stitched From the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South. By Gladys-Marie Fry. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 102, prefaces, acknowledgments, prologue, illustrations photographs, notes, bibliography. $27.50 paper). In The Planter's Prospect, John Vlach presents a carefully focused study of a specialized genre-paintings of plantation vistas in the southern United States. From forty-one identified who created such works, Vlach's core chapters provide detailed case studies for six who produced significant bodies of work in this genre. These relatively obscure artists include men and women whose careers span the period 1800 to 1935, and who documented plantations from Maryland to Louisiana (3). The six chapters include biographical data and analyses of paintings, but the author never loses sight of the aim of this work, which is to examine these works as expressions of social attitudes about race, privilege, and authority. Plantation images produced during the antebellum period were generally commissioned by the plantation owners. Vlach found that the prominent placement of imposing mansions in idyllic natural settings in these paintings tended to reinforce social images of wealth, power, and stability while obscuring evidence of both the agricultural landscape and the people whose labor produced that wealth. Postbellum images, in contrast, include romanticized depictions of black field hands at work, in a nostalgic attempt to invoke the old order during a time of economic and social upheaval. Vlach's text is clear and engaging, supported by helpful documentation, and accompanied by well-chosen and beautifully reproduced illustrations. Stitched from the Soul is a reissue of a 1990 work. The text is unchanged, but the book includes a new preface and an expanded bibliography. Fry has compiled images of African American quilts and related extracts from the narratives of former slaves collected by the WPA Federal Writer's Project, supplemented with additional historical and oral sources. The reissue of this book is a welcome resource in response to recent interest in quilts made by slaves. With the ambitious scope of this book-to examines the history of quilting in the African community (vii)-also come its major limitations. Aspiring to be broadly inclusive, the author has pulled together material and narrative resources representing a wide variety of experiences. The juxtaposition of disparate elements results in a narrative that is geographically and historically nonspecific. As there was no single enslaved African community, the experiences of individual slaves varied widely. A seamstress in Charleston, a sugar-cane worker in Louisiana, and a mulatto cook in the big house may have shared the humiliation of enslavement, but their daily lives were not the same. …