Landscape in the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee
To me, there are works of art that, because of their technique, novelty, aesthetic, history, or the force of their makers’ vision, are amazing to behold. Robert S. Duncanson’s Landscape in the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee is one of them. The beauty of this painting—the bucolic scene, the easy naturalism, the artist’s amazing technique—make it a standout compared to anything else in its class. I marvel, for example, at the elegant cursive that Duncanson uses to render the riffle and heron in the creek. I love the romantic quality, the way Duncanson amalgamated various parts of different landscapes to create something that is naturally impossible but utterly convincing. And it is so palpable. You can feel the humidity building under the clouds.
I see Duncanson’s body of work as evidence of a powerful will to self-actualize. His adopted home of Cincinnati was considered an art capital when he lived there in the mid-1800s. While working as a sign painter, he taught himself to paint a la the Hudson Valley School. He surely met the leading Black artists of the city. Supported by the abolitionist community, Duncanson would go on to travel extensively through the South to paint landscapes, which stokes my curiosity about him. I can’t help wondering what would compel a free Black man to risk his life and liberty simply to make art.
Duncanson may have been trying to build his reputation and increase the value of his work, despite the danger. (Some scholars believe his mixed ancestry may have reduced the risk by allowing him to pass as white.) Perhaps, as some scholars believe, he communicated abolitionist messages to enslaved people through metaphors and visual references in his painting.
I’m no scholar, so I can’t say. I simply prefer to think Duncanson’s life and work says something about the desire for beauty and the force of the creative urge. Is the drive to make art, is the experience itself, worth all risk? Naively, perhaps, I like to believe Duncanson thought so.
Mark Nardone, communications manager
Robert Seldon Duncanson, Landscape in the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee, Circa 1851–53
Museum purchase 2018.0037A