The University of North Carolina Press

240 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 12 color / 110 b&w illus., notes, index

The Richard Hampton Jenrette Series in Architecture and the Decorative Arts

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-2686-7

Published: March 2002

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-5352-8

Published: March 2002

The Planter's Prospect

Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings

By John Michael Vlach

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Although nineteenth-century American landscapes typically were painted from a high vantage point, looking down from above, southern landscapes that featured plantations diverged from this convention in telling ways. Portraits of planters' landholdings were often depicted from a point below the plantation house, a perspective that directs the viewer's gaze upward and, as John Vlach observes, echoes the deference and respect the planter class assumed was its due. Moreover, Vlach notes, slaves were rarely represented in plantation paintings made before the Civil War, although it was slave labor that powered the plantation system. After the war and the abolition of slavery, he argues, a wistful revisionism seems to have restored these people--still toiling in the service of the masters--to the landscapes they had created and on which they were so cruelly mistreated.

This richly illustrated book explores the statements of power and ironic evasions encoded in plantation landscapes, focusing on six artists whose collective body of work spans the period between 1800 and 1935 and documents plantations across the South, from Maryland to Louisiana: Francis Guy, Charles Fraser, Adrien Persac, Currier & Ives chief artist Fanny Palmer, William Aiken Walker, and Alice Ravenel Huger Smith.

About the Author

John Michael Vlach is professor of American studies and anthropology at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. His previous books include Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery and Plain Painters: Making Sense of American Folk Art.

Reviews

"[An] insightful new study of the perspective of landscape illustrators [on] southern plantations between the years 1800 and 1950. . . . Like the works of the commercial and romantic illustrators, these are paintings by and for an elite whose wealth belied the cruelty and racism of the system that fashioned it. They are the products of the gaze of both northern and southern elites, equally uninterested in the perspective of the plantation workers or their material world."
--Civil War Book Review

"The Planter's Prospect is a valuable study of an overlooked genre that is also an important model for how to evaluate art's 'truth-telling' claims. As such, it should provoke considerable debate."
--Mississippi Quarterly

"His work stands as an important caution for those who would use plantation paintings uncritically as accurate documents of particular places or as correct likenesses of the plantation landscape, revealing that what is conspicuously missing is as important as what is meticulously detailed."
--Civil War History

"A remarkable assemblage of imagery almost never contemplated by mainstream art history. . . . An important catalog of a widely overlooked genre."
--Journal of American History

"John Michael Vlach aptly looks beyond the prettiness of plantation landscapes and remembers those who made it possible for America to have an elite culture."
--Journal of Southern History

"With the right momentum of insight and cultural preparation, this book addresses the quintessential issues of American plantation paintings. The chapter on Black figures alone should be required reading in African American studies. A gem."
--Robert Farris Thompson, Yale University