Robert Scott Lennon Lotus Eaters Analysis

Robert Scott Duncanson was born in New York in 1821, Duncanson’s father was from canadian and his mother was African American, therefore making him biracial. Giving the fact he was biracial he was a freeman. Duncanson is an artist who started as a fancey painter but taught himself how to paint. He is relatively unknown today for his Beautiful artworks of landscapes and serene, Duncanson’s work sheds light on American art that has been forgotten for over decades.

As a young boy, Duncanson lived with his father in Canada, while his mother lived in Ohio. The village was fifteen miles north of Cincinnati. In the summer of 1841 Duncanson left Canada for Mount Pleasant. As he return to his mother’s home, Duncanson was excited to inform

her that he would like to pursue his dream of being a artist. He wanted to do more with paint than using it for houses, which he has been doing with his father in canada. Fancy painting has more to do with designing the interior of houses and simulating wallpaper. At the age of 17 Duncanson had his own business painting and glazing window trims. He grew tired of the tradesman lifestyle and fantasized more about his intrested in paint landscapes instead of houses. Making the move to Cincinnati to him felt as though it was the best choice for him to leave painting houses behind. Although Duncanson possessed the drive and determination to be an artist, he had yet to receive any type of training, showed great determination in teaching himself art by painting portraits and copying prints. As progressed to doing portraits he worked in photography using daguerreotype printing process but, found that he does his best work doing landscapes.
The Ohio River Valley became Duncanson’s main Purpose, by 1842 his art was being exhibited in the Cincinnati area. While modeling his pictures, he wanted to show the romantic, untarnish images of America’s natural landscape. Cincinnati proved the the ideal sceneries for Duncanson’s work and, he was also supported by a vast majority of whites and blacks whom he depicted in portraits. The city thrived off of artistic expression, and by 1844, Duncanson’s significance was becoming recognized by critics and publications. Although he was making progress personally and publicly as an artist, the lacked commissions for his paintings pushed him to leave Cincinnati. Duncanson moved to Detroit, while there he returned to his roots as a portrait painter and also work at a local press. He grew tired of Detroit and became interested in genre painting tradition, so he would move back to Cincinnati in 1846. Duncanson’s first work from the era, Cliff Mines in 1848. This painting was commissioned by abolitionist clergyman Charles Avery. Working alongside a famous painting called Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River, done a few years later, solidified his status as one of the region’s most important painters. The Cliff Mines being among the earliest of his landscape paints was a little flat because Duncanson doesn't use a wide range of colors in his painting. Duncanson wanted to be the best in the west, meaning he’d have to leave ohio and go on a Grand tour across seas. Duncanson met a wealthy Cincinnati landowner named Nicholas Longworth. Longworth was interested in extending Duncanson’s career well beyond Ohio. In early 1851, Longworth commissioned him to paint eight very big landscape murals and two floral vignettes to adorn the Longworth family house called Belmont. They are not frames they are paintings known as Trompe L'oeil, meaning foot the eye. Duncanson used led paint to protect the images as they start to get old. The belmont now stands as the Taft Museum, with Duncanson’s work remaining as one of the biggest pre-Civil War domestic murals in the United States. This assignment was the largest and most ambitious of Duncanson’s career, and helped him to finance a trip to go overseas and expand his art work and knowledge. Duncanson meet asabby business man named JP Ball, he own a studio that he would purchase paintings to put them in. One day head had the idea of making something that was known as Panorama. A panorama is a 600 foot scroll that was filled with paintings. JP Ball selected Duncanson to paint these massive paintings for his studio.
It was traditional for any artist in Duncanson’s era to make what was called a “grand tour” of Europe’s art treasures made by old masters, but no African American artist had previously done so. In 1853, along with fellow landscape artist William Louis Sonntag, he went on a nine-month tour that included England, France, and Italy before returning to Canada. Duncanson was the first African American artist to take this tour. Duncanson was affected by his journey but found way to resolve his problem so he could continue traveling as often as possible. Each sojourn brought new elements to his work; in England, he was welcomed by abolitionists and aristocrats. He met the renowned poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose works became elements of literary interpretation in Duncanson’s paintings. His travels throughout Italy were evident in the subsequent inclusion of fantasy elements within his landscapes, and his painting Landscape With Rainbow incorporated French attitudes, particularly those of artist Claude Lorrain.
Time spent among intellectual artists and committed opponents to slavery in Europe also spurred Duncanson’s political sensibilities. In the years before the Civil War began in 1861, he increasingly donated paintings to abolitionist causes and personally participated in several demonstrations and activist rallies. Just as war broke out in the United States, Duncanson created what many critics and historians believe to be his magnum opus, a large work called Land of the Lotus Eaters. Inspired by Tennyson and Homer, the sprawling landscape is populated with Blacks attending to the needs of white soldiers. The work was hailed as a prescient masterpiece of the struggle to save the union and end slavery. But the racial and economic tensions of the time left little room or comfort for Duncanson to exhibit his work, and he left the country, alighting first in Montreal, Canada, and then touring Europe once more.
After exhibiting Land of the Lotus Eaters, Duncanson was welcomed again by the European artistic and aristocratic communities.

Among his admirers was the Queen of England, who purchased his works. Land of the Lotus Eaters eventually came to be owned by the king of Sweden. Duncanson became enchanted with the Scottish highlands, and throughout the 1860s, he created a stirring series of landscapes while traveling between the United States and Europe. An 1871 painting, Ellen’s Isle, Loch Katrine, is hailed as the artist’s final masterwork. Although he remained in good health physically, Duncanson began to suffer from dementia in the late 1860s, and his condition steadily worsened until he was placed in a sanitarium in Detroit, Michigan, following a violent seizure. He died there on December 21, 1872.

Duncanson was an enterprising, self-taught landscape artist who was able to begin his career with the support of wealthy business men who knew would be successful in his art. He used the fame he acquired to support the abolitionist cause and became the first African American landscape artist to earn and make a living internationally. Duncanson’s works are now displayed throughout the United States, England, and Scotland. The Taft Museum of Art annually recognizes contemporary creations of African Americans through the Duncanson Artist-in-Residence

Program.