The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Landscape, Robert Scott Duncanson, 1865
The glories of the natural world in North America made landscape painting a genre in which American artists could stake a claim to greatness. The Cincinnati-based Duncanson, son of a white father and a free black mother, left the U.S. for two years during the Civil War to live and work in Canada, searching for a place where his race would present no obstacle to his career. This painting is presumed to be a scene along the Saint Lawrence River.

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