A closer look
Frederick Douglass on a Powerful Portrait
How did popular art visualize Reconstruction’s promise of equality?
Essay by Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, CUNY (Emeritus)
Frederick Douglass was delighted and moved when he saw this portrait published by Louis Prang and Company, one of the nation's leading dealers of inexpensive color prints, or chromolithographs. In 1870, the firm issued a print of Hiram R. Revels, the newly elected senator from Mississippi. The Revels portrait was based on a painting by the German immigrant, abolitionist, and Union Army veteran Theodore Kaufmann, which in turn was based on a photograph taken by Mathew Brady.
“It strikes me as a faithful representation of the man,” Douglass commented after Prang sent him a copy of the print. “Whatever may be the prejudices of those who may look upon it, they will be compelled to admit that the Mississippi Senator is a man, and one who will easily pass for a man among men. We colored men so often see ourselves described and painted as monkeys, that we think it a great piece of good fortune to find an exception to this general rule.”
Perhaps, Douglass continued, Black Americans might now be “emancipated” from cruel pictorial stereotypes, allowing them to share in the beauty and inspiration of art already enjoyed by white citizens: “Heretofore, colored Americans have thought little of adorning their parlors with pictures. They have had to do with the stern, and I may say, the ugly realities of life. Pictures come not with slavery and oppression and destitution, but with liberty, fair play, leisure, and refinement. These conditions are now possible to colored American citizens, and I think the walls of their houses will soon begin to bear evidences of their altered relations to the people about them.”
“This portrait,” Douglass concluded, “is a historical picture. It marks, with almost startling emphasis, the point dividing our new from our old condition.”
Can any single image merit such a claim for significance? And why would this and similar portraits mean so much for African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War?
To Douglass, the quest for full citizenship for African Americans encompassed more than political rights: it extended to cultural rights as well, an equality that involved freedpeople’s access to all forms of expression and dissemination. And Douglass understood that Revels’s picture had particular significance for freedpeople. For Douglass, “representation” had a political and pictorial meaning—and those meanings had to merge if the Civil War’s promise of equality was to be realized. Revels’s realistic portrait embodied the hopes, obstacles, and possibilities comprising Reconstruction.
Despite Douglass’s claims for this portrait’s particular significance, by the time he praised the Prang print, many news and commemorative images of African American leaders, as well as significant events involving them and Black Americans in general, had already been published as individual prints and in the pages of the burgeoning weekly and monthly illustrated press. These pictures seemed to augur a new era in the creation of an inclusive public pictorial record. At least in the short term, Black Americans had at their disposal inexpensive images with which they could at last adorn the walls of their homes.
Reflection Questions
How did Frederick Douglass link the goal of equal representation in society with equal representation in the visual arts?
Exam the Revels chromolithograph. How would you describe Revels as he is depicted in the portrait? What visual aspects contribute to that description?
Frederick Douglass (who may have been the most photographed American in the nineteenth century) understood the power of a portrait. Go to the Library of Congress collection of Douglass portraits (https://www.loc.gov/photos/?q=frederick+douglass+portraits), read his remarks about the Revels portrait, and consider what messages he wanted to convey in his own pictures.
Additional Reading
John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York,: Liveright Publishing, 2015).
Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).