Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century

Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century by Shaw, Gwendolyn Dubois. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780295985718.

From the American Revolution through the Civil War and on into the Gilded Age, American artists created dynamic images of black sitters. Many of these portraits illuminate the search for a self-possessed identity as well as cultural stereotypes and practices. Portraits of a People looks critically at images made of and by African Americans. They range from a 1773 engraving of the African-born poet Phillis Wheatley purportedly drawn by her friend, the slave Scipio Moorhead, to an 1897 portrait of the artists mother painted by the expatriate Henry O. Tanner while visiting from Paris. Portraits of a People features color reproductions of more than 100 important portraits in various media, drawn from museum and historical collections across the United States. The biographies of individual sitters, artists, or histories of the works are discussed in short texts. Essays consider various issues of how the self was fashioned pictorially and the development of unique identities through the formal portraiture of freeborn and previously enslaved African American artists and sitters.