Courtesy McCord Stewart Museum
By Shawn MacWha
Local Journalism Initiative
For hundreds of years the Eastern Townships has been a destination for refugees. Whether it was the first Abenaki people fleeing early European incursions along the coast of Maine, United Empire Loyalists following the Crown northwards, or displaced Scottish Highlanders evicted from their ancestral crofts, people have been seeking new beginnings in this land for generations.
Robert Scott Duncanson was such a man. Born in the tiny hamlet of Fayette in the Finger Lakes region of New York sometime in 1821 Duncanson spent much of his childhood in Monroe, Michigan just south of Detroit. In 1840 he moved to Cincinnati and it was there that he emerged as the first internationally recognized African-American artist. Largely self-taught he first practised his art as a young man by making copies of popular prints while earning a living as a house painter. Later, he progressed to portraits and still-life paintings, gaining commissions from some of the more liberal minded citizens of the time who refused to let the colour of his skin mask his inherent talent. Towards the end of the 1840s Duncanson turned to landscape painting and was a founding member of the Ohio River Valley technique which sought to capture the soft beauty of America’s pastoral scenes. By the 1850s many considered Duncanson to be the premier landscape artist in the United States.
Despite these talents Duncanson faced an unceasing tide of racism during his time in Ohio. As a frontier city on the border between slave and free states Cincinnati saw major race riots in 1829, 1836 and 1841 and these tensions remained part of the city’s fabric throughout Duncanson’s time in Ohio. As art historian Joseph Ketner noted in a 1993 “A major portion of Cincinnati’s booming economy depended upon southern trade, forcing Duncanson to face the spectre of slavery daily in the markets, at the docks, and across the river from his home.”
These tensions were only heightened during the American Civil War and in 1863 Duncanson finally decided to leave his homeland and seek a more tolerant audience. He intended to go to Europe to exhibit his works but first stopped in Montreal which he had visited the previous year. Upon his return to that city he was so warmly greeted by the local artistic community that he cancelled his European plans and took up residence in Canada. In September, 1863 he mounted his first serious exhibition in his new homeland, showing his popular paintings Land of the Lotus Eaters and Western Tornado in the home of local photographer William Notman.
For the next two years Duncanson used Montreal as a base of operations as he travelled throughout Central Canada collecting material for future paintings. The Eastern Townships were a favoured destination for him during this time, and his journeys to this area ultimately resulted in some of his most beautiful paintings including Mount Orford and Owl’s Head Mountain. The first of these landscapes was last sold in 2005 when it was purchased at auction for the impressive sum of $296,000 US dollars. The latter work, Owl’s Head Mountain, now forms part of the collection of the National Gallery of Canada along with several of Duncanson’s other paintings. Other notable works from Duncanson’s time in Canada included Mount Royal, Waterfall on Montmorency, and St. Ann’s River. He also produced a number of other major works during this time not associated with the Canadian landscape including his stunningly beautiful Vale of Kashmir. This work showed the influence of British poetry upon his painting, with Alfred Tennyson, John Keats and William Wordsworth being cited as inspirations for his sweeping landscapes.
Not content to merely paint the local countryside, Duncanson also became an important mentor for several emerging Canadian painters during his time in Montreal. The most successful of these artists was Aaron Allan Edson, a native of the Eastern Townships who became a leading Canadian landscape artist himself and was, in 1880, a founder of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Another close associate at the time was Prussian born Canadian artist Otto Reinhold Jacobi.
Following the end of the Civil War Duncanson left Montreal to make his much-delayed trip to Europe, after which he returned to Cincinnati in 1866. He continued to paint for the next several years but by the early 1870s his health was starting to decline. In the autumn of 1872 he suffered from a nervous breakdown while preparing for an exhibition in Detroit and was confined to a nearby “insane asylum.” For the next two months he was beset with dementia and the belief that he was possessed by the soul of deceased artist, with some speculating that his condition was the result of lead poisoning from his earlier work as a house painter in the 1830s and 1840s.
Duncanson died in Detroit on December 21st, 1872 and was buried alongside his parents and several siblings at the family plot in the Woodland Cemetery in Monroe, Michigan. In a sad and troubling sign of the times his obituary in the Chicago Tribune the following week sought to downplay his work, noting that “It added a special feature of interest to his paintings that Mr. Duncanson had negro blood in his veins, and his pictures were, therefore looked upon with more or less of curiosity, and this feat sometimes gained for them a sale which could not always have been secured for them by their real artistic merit…” Fortunately, a much more enlightened view of Duncanson’s skills holds today, and he is recognized for his fine artworks in leading museums around the world.
While Duncanson’s time in the Eastern Townships was fleeting, limited only to short expeditions to paint the local landscape, his mark on the region is noteworthy. During his short time in Canada he not only shared the beauty of this land with a global audience, but he also helped a new generation of Canadian artists to do the same. No small feat for a disheartened refugee 160 years ago.
