Black artist who painted Biden gift influenced Canadian landscape
Though not on the epic scale as the performances of Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and that amazing young poet, shortly after that memorable outdoor swearing-in show on Jan. 20, President Biden and Vicepresident Kamala Harris attended the presentation of a painting by an artist with a remarkable Canadian, specifically Quebec, past.
Presenting a symbolic painting to the new president has been an inaugural tradition since Ronald Reagan. The pick this time around, reportedly with the input of the new first lady, is a painting by Robert S. Duncanson.
Titled Landscape with Rainbow, the work depicts an idyllic country scene over which a rainbow arches, a pioneer couple gaze, and a small herd of cattle grazes. Duncanson, a Cincinnati-based Afro-american artist, painted the piece in 1859, two years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and four years before he fled to Canada.
The painting is one of several works by Duncanson in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, including Quebec scenes, Waterfall at Mont-morency and On the St. Annes, Canada East.
It was a patron of the Musée National des Beaux Arts de Québec who recognized and Tweeted the local importance of Duncanson. A headline in Le Soleil proclaimed “Un artiste du MNBAQ à l’investiture de Joe Biden!” That bold declaration was based on the presence in the museum’s collection of two works by Duncanson depicting local scenes, Le Lac Saint Charles, and Le Lac Beauport.
Despite the Quebec gallery’s boast, the National Art Gallery in Ottawa, however, has the largest collection of Duncanson paintings in Canada; among the seven works are Mount Royal, Owl’s Head Mountain, and Mount Orford, Morning. The gallery mounted an exhibition of Duncanson’s paintings in 1997.
When he fetched up in Montreal, as the Civil War raged and with Duncanson thinking, according to one biographer, that the Union army would lose, he befriended William Notman, the prolific photographer who was busy capturing images of places and people in a growing young nation in the later half of the 1800s.
Together, Notman and Duncanson collaborated on many projects, and the photographer took pictures of the painter’s work. That was a good thing in the case of one of Duncanson’s more distinctive works, City and Harbour of Quebec, which has been lost; the photo Notman took of it is one of the 450,000 prints of his in Montreal’s Mccord Museum collection.
Duncanson’s rather extraordinary life and career as a landscape painter was also somewhat lost to time, but art critics began to rediscover him in the 1970s. This new interest in Duncanson uncovered some riddles about the man, including his ancestry.
Indeed, the biographical notes for the Duncanson collection in the Smithsonian say, “He was born in Seneca County, New York, in 1821 to an African-american mother and Scottishcanadian father, who sent his son to Canadian schools during his youth.”
One recent biographer has dismissed the notion of a Scottish-canadian father, although there is no conclusive evidence of exactly who sired him, or even his specific birthdate. The Canadian Dictionary of Biography stirs the pot in its entry on Duncanson, claiming he “was given at least a primary school education by his father (and) spent his childhood in Montreal.”
What we do know for sure is Duncanson came north to escape the war but, practically speaking, as a “freeman” Black, he could not get a passport to leave the United States to tour Europe with his by then-famous collection of paintings. Canada offered a more racially tolerant base from which to depart for the galleries across the pond.
He felt so comfortable and welcomed in Montreal he extended his stay for nearly two years. When he taught at Notman’s Montreal studio, one of his students was Allan Edson, from the Eastern Townships, who went on to become one of Canada’s most important landscape artists of that era.
Duncanson’s Canadian genealogy may be in doubt but there’s no question his relatively brief stay in Quebec left a lasting impression on him and Canadian art. As one art historian put it, “largely due to Duncanson’s influence, Canadians witnessed the development of a national school of landscape painting.”