Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture - Hardcover

by Rachel Stephens (Author)

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence, familial separation, and dehumanization that they faced. In response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either through idealization or outright erasure of enslaved life.

In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture, Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.

Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealized and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny--especially that depicted in art--enacted by supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker's confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia.

Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the existing narratives of American art and history.

Back Jacket

On the cover: Four Children in a Louisiana Landscape, or Bélizaire and the Frey Children, 1837. Oil on canvas. Attributed to Jacques Amans, Courtesy of Jeremy K. Simien.

Even when African Americans were included in portraits, as in the case with Four Children in a Louisiana Landscape, sometimes they were subsequently removed. This work had been owned and kept in storage by the New Orleans Museum of Art since 1972, but in 2004 it was deemed "not relevant" to their mission and deaccessioned. At that time, the painting pictured only three white children, although a shadow of a fourth figure was visible. Subsequent conservation uncovered the titular fourth child: an African American boy leaning against the tree behind the others. Louisiana collector Jeremy K. Simien acquired the painting in 2021, and author Katy Morlas Shannon identified the boy as a fifteen-year-old enslaved house servant named Bélizaire. Bélizaire was born to an enslaved woman named Sally in New Orleans in 1822. Sally and Bélizaire were sold to Frederick Frey, a German merchant and head of Union Bank in New Orleans, in 1828. The portrait was commissioned by Frey in 1837, likely from Jacques Amans, a French portraitist working in New Orleans. Bélizaire was painted over for unknown reasons at some later point. The subsequent uncovering of the figure as well as Bélizaire's story speaks not only to the concealment of enslavement that long occurred in the South, but also to the possibility and imperative of recovery. The urgency of these ideas is now being recognized by major art museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently acquired the painting, and Bélizaire's likeness and history will be featured before an international audience despite one-time attempts to erase him.

Author Biography

Rachel Stephens is associate professor of art history at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Selling Andrew Jackson: Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture. In preparing this project, Stephens served as a Tyson Scholar at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the fall of 2018; a fellow at Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition in the spring of 2019; and an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at CASVA in the fall of 2020.