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Ad Code: 2
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from Auction House Records.
View of Asheville, North Carolina view includes one structure still standing (Ravenscroft School)
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Although Hudson River style landscape painting is most associated with
Robert Duncanson, his floral still lifes first brought him recognition.
He is also thought to be the first black painter and muralist in
America to earn his living by painting and to become internationally
known.
Born in New York State to a Scottish Canadian father and
mulatto mother, he likely had a birth year between 1817 and 1822, but
that remains uncertain. Because of racial prejudice, his father took
him to Canada to be educated in a more tolerant atmosphere. As an
artist, he was largely self-taught and studied reproductions of the
Hudson River School painters. In 1841, he joined his mother in
Cincinnati, Ohio, and shortly after began exhibiting there.
Nicholas
Longworth, a prominent citizen, supported his work and commissioned him
to paint murals in his residence, now the Taft Museum. These eight
murals were large-scale landscapes with elaborate frames and were
covered with wall paper by subsequent owners. However, the daughter of
these owners and her husband, Anna Sinton and Charles Taft, gave them
to the city of Cincinnati, and Cincinnati Art Museum Director, Walter
Siple had them restored.
Duncanson traveled widely from
Cincinnati, doing numerous landscapes and also some daguerreotypes. In
1853, he went to Europe and then returned to paint classical motifs
into his landscapes, obviously influenced by his exposure in Europe to
Neo-Classicism. During the Civil War, he was in England and Scotland.
In 1872 he suffered a mental breakdown and died shortly after in
Detroit, Michigan.
Source:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following was submitted February 2005 by Laura Crockett, Fine Arts
Specialist of Brunk Auctions. The biography was extracted from
the article 'Robert Duncanson's View of Asheville, North Carolina, 1850
by Andrew Brunk in "May We All Remember Well", Robert Brunk, 1997.
Robert
Scott Duncanson was born in 1821 in upstate New York. From New York his
family moved west to Monroe, a town on the western tip of Lake Erie in
what is now Michigan. Duncanson apprenticed in the family trades of
house painting and carpentry. In 1838, he and an associate formed a
partnership and advertised as "painters and glaziers" in the "Monroe
Gazette".
Through the 1840's, Duncanson taught himself the
techniques of fine-art painting, concerning himself primarily with
portraiture, but painting some historical subjects, estate views, genre
scenes, and copies of well-known works taken from prints. The Longworth
Murals represent Duncanson's largest commission. They were likely
executed during 1850-1852.
By the beginning of 1850, Duncanson was residing primarily in Cincinnati in a studio adjoining that of William Sonntag.
In
1850, his painting View of Asheville, North Carolina was executed. The Asheville Messenger recorded the visit on August 14, 1850 with
the following lines: "Artists.- Mr. R.S.Duncanson and Mr. A.O. Moore,
of Cincinnati, Ohio, have been at our village and vicinity for a
fortnight or more, taking sketches of the mountain and river scenery.-
They have visited Warm Springs, French Broad, Black Mountain,
Cumberland Gap and Hickory Nut Gap, and have a number of correct
sketches of the most interesting objects at these places. Mr. Duncanson
appears to be a fine artist...."
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Biography from Roger King Fine Art, A - G:
| Robert Scott Duncanson (1821-1872) was a major figure in the mid-19th
century group of Ohio River Valley landscape painters; during his
lifetime he earned a reputation as a painter in the western United
States. The son of a free African-American mother and a
Scottish-Canadian father, Duncanson was apprenticed in his youth to his
family's housepainting and carpentry business in Canada. He was
self-taught as an artist and began his career by copying popular
prints. His first forays into independent works were mainly
portraits.
Duncanson moved to Cincinnati in the 1840s, the
city to which he would always return and with which he is most closely
associated. For some years he worked as an itinerant painter; the
progress of his career is an often-confusing web of locations and
dates. Duncanson moved between cities like Detroit and
Cincinnati, sometimes staying for as little as a year. In
addition, he made frequent sketching trips that took him back and forth
across the mid-West, East to New England, and north to Canada. For a
time he advertised himself as a portrait and "historical" painter in
Detroit; later he was known as a "daguerreotype artist" in
Cincinnati. In the early 1850s, he received a commission from
Nicholas Longworth, a wealthy Cincinnati landowner, horticulturist, art
patron and ardent abolitionist, to execute an elaborate series of
murals for the walls of his home, "Belmont." This commission
marked the largest single project of Duncanson's career and provided
him with the means to undertake his first tour of Europe.
Duncanson
traveled to England and Europe several times, first in the company of
William Sonntag, another major landscapist of the Ohio Valley group,
and John Robinson Tait. In England he was welcomed by an
aristocratic group of abolitionist supporters. Duncanson also
traveled to Scotland, exhibiting his work and making sketches that he
later developed into landscape paintings. The influence of his
travels in Italy is evident in the elements of fantasy in his
mid-career works. Toward the end of his career, Duncanson spent
time in Canada, where he was influenced by the extreme wilderness, and
his works from that period inclined toward greater detail and
observation of nature.
Duncanson made a final trip to Scotland
in 1871, exhibiting a body of new landscapes on his return to
America. Although his career was flourishing, he suffered
increasingly from delusions, hallucinations, and anxiety. Always
excitable, garrulous and somewhat obsessive, his mental stability
became increasingly impaired as his career progressed. It has
been theorized that Duncanson suffered from lead-paint poisoning, the
cumulative effect of his years as a housepainter, exacerbated by years
of grinding and mixing paints.
He was hospitalized at the Michigan State Retreat, a sanitarium, and died in December 1872.
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Biography from Q.M.R. Fine Art Consulting, LLC:
| Robert S. Duncanson achieved unprecedented renown in the art world in the 19th century despite the adversity he faced as a freeborn "person of color", earning national and international acclaim for his landscape paintings. He pursued his artistic career during a time of tremendous racial prejudice and was one the first African American artists to appropriate the landscape as part of his cultural heritage and as an expression of his cultural identity.
He was a self trained artist and started his career as a apprentice working as a house painter (murals), portraiture, and landscape art in Cincinnati, Detroit, Montreal and London. His method is attributed to Thomas Cole and William Sonntag to whom he traveled and studied with extensively. Many of his paintings were attributed to other well known caucasian artists of the time due to racial prejudice and the need for him to earn a living in his trade.
His formative years focused on portraits and murals from commissioned work. After traveling up to New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Cananda his focused changed more to that around the Hudson River School movement and Ohio River Valley.
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| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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Robert Duncanson is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Hudson River School Painters
Black American Artists
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