Contraband Guides

Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era

Paul H. D. Kaplan

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780271083858
• eBook ISBN: 9780271088228
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a "contraband guide," a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan documents the ways in which American cultural encounters with Europe and its venerable artistic traditions influenced nineteenth-century concepts of race in the United States.

Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of people of color in European art and society, and American artists and authors, both black and white, adapted and transformed European visual material to respond to the particular struggles over the identity of African Americans. Taking up the work of both well- and lesser-known artists and writers—such as the travel writings of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, the paintings of German American Emanuel Leutze, the epistolary exchange between John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, newspaper essays written by Frederick Douglass and William J. Wilson, and the sculpture of freed slave Eugène Warburg—Kaplan lays bare how racial attitudes expressed in mid-nineteenth-century American art were deeply inflected by European traditions.

By highlighting the contributions people of black African descent made to the fine arts in the United States during this period, along with the ways in which they were represented, Contraband Guides provides a fresh perspective on the theme of race in Civil War–era American art. It will appeal to art historians, to specialists in African American studies and American studies, and to general readers interested in American art and African American history.

Table of contents

• COVER front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Chapter 1: Representations of People of Color in Nineteenth-Century American Accounts of Italian Travel
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: “A Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans”: Eugène Warburg in Europe, 1853–1859
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: “The Black Man To-day Means Liberty”: African American Figures in the Work of Emanuel Leutze
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: “Something American”: Art and Slavery in the Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: Old Masters: The Western Tradition of the Visual Arts in African American Culture in the Civil War Era
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Chapter 6: Contraband Guide: Mark Twain on Race and the Renaissance
• Notes to Chapter 6
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index