Landscape with Rainbow

Robert S. Duncanson, born Fayette, NY 1821-died Detroit, MI 1872 · 1859

Robert Seldon Duncanson was America’s best known African American painter in the years surrounding the Civil War. Based in Cincinnati, he was supported by abolitionists who bought his paintings and sponsored his trip to Europe to study from the Old Masters. In this pastoral landscape, a young couple strolls through fertile pastureland, toward a house at the end of a rainbow. The cattle head home toward the nearby cottage, reinforcing the sense that man lives in harmony with nature. Duncanson’s vision of rural America as Arcadia, a landscape akin to paradise, is a characteristic feature of his work, a late hope for peace before the onset of Civil War.