Active in Cincinnati, Ohio, after 1840, Robert Scott Duncanson aspired to greatness as a landscape painter. By the 1860s the American press proclaimed him the ​“best landscape painter in the West,” while London newspapers hailed him as the equal of his British contemporaries. Both then and now he rivaled the achievements of American landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, and John Frederick Kensett, who shaped the country’s early landscape tradition in the Hudson River Valley style.

A mature example of Duncanson’s art, Landscape with Rainbow[SAAM, 1983.95.160] belies his initially intuitive, schematic style. At mid-century, Cincinnati was a major regional art center where landscape painting flourished because of the city’s cultural oppor-tunities and southern Ohio’s appealingly unspoiled terrain. Exposure to paintings in the Hudson River style and travel throughout Canada, England, France, and Italy stimulated Duncanson’s inherent talent. The well-accepted practice of copying engravings after paintings by other artists and his experiences as a diorama painter and photographer enhanced his technical skills. Landscape with Rainbow reflects the benefits of Duncanson’s first trip to Europe in 1853. There he saw the paintings of seventeenth-century French landscapist Claude Lorrain, whose emphasis on classically organized compositions and atmospheric effects influenced so many American painters. In this painting, for example, Duncanson has organized a vast expanse along diagonals created by rock formations, lakes and streams, stands of trees, and mountain slopes. Washed by golden light, the broad pastoral scene exemplifies Duncanson’s preference for nature’s harmony and beauty rather than the terror and power of its forces. His traveling companion—landscapist William Louis Sonntag—also proved instrumental, for although the two men did not share a student/​teacher relationship, Duncanson learned from Sonntag’s meticulous technique and evocative use of color.

Tragically, mental illness ended the artist’s career and life, a circumstance perhaps attributable as much to long-term lead poisoning as to the social and personal pressures of his interracial heritage. Ultimately, however, the psychological difficulties that he suffered do not diminish his ambitions and accomplishments as a photographer, muralist, and painter.

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan African-American Art: 19^th and 20^th-Century Selections (brochure. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art)

“English landscapes were better than any in Europe, and the English are great in watercolor while the French are better historical painters than the English. I am disgusted with our Artists in Europe. They are mean Copyists. My trip to Europe has to some extent enabled me to judge of my own talent. Of all the landscapes I saw in Europe (and I saw thousands) I do not feel discouraged.” — Robert Scott Duncanson in Letter from Duncanson to Junius R. Sloan, 22 Jan. 1854. Platt R. Spencer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill.

Robert Scott Duncanson was perhaps the most accomplished African-American painter in the United States from 1850 to 1860. He was born in Seneca County, New York, in 1821 to an African-American mother and Scottish-Canadian father, who sent his son to Canadian schools during his youth. In 1841 Duncanson and his mother moved to Mt. Healthy, Ohio, near Cincinnati. Little else is known about Duncanson’s early life except that his second wife Phoebe was biracial, and the couple’s only child, a son Mittie, was born in Cincinnati.

It is not known when or where Duncanson received his early artistic training, but by 1842 he had begun exhibiting in Cincinnati. In 1853 Duncanson made his first European trip, which was apparently financed by an abolitionist organization from Ohio. He visited England, France, and Italy, and may have traveled to Germany. In England, Duncanson was especially attracted to the landscapes of Claude Lorrain and J. M. W. Turner. Duncanson’s trip to Europe probably did not last longer than a year as he returned to Cincinnati in 1854 and became the proprietor of a photography studio. But by the following year, he had switched from photography to painting full time.

Duncanson’s paintings may be divided into five categories: portraits, regional landscapes, landscapes inspired by literature, still lifes, and murals. The largest and most important commission in Duncanson’s career was a series of murals he painted for abolitionist and political leader Nicholas Longworth between 1848 and 1850 for the main entrance of Belmont, his residence in Cincinnati. The Belmont murals consist of four over-door compositions and eight large landscape paintings executed in a trompe l’oeil style. Each panel is more than six by nine feet, and are the largest paintings among Duncanson’s works.

Sometime in 1849 Duncanson established a studio in Detroit where he had been active as early as 1846. His artistic activities were favorably noted in both Cincinnati and Detroit where he worked throughout his career. Duncanson was also at one time associated with the prominent African-American photographer J. P. Ball in Cincinnati. Ball employed Duncanson to execute finished oil paintings from daguerreotypes.

Duncanson’s finest paintings are the landscapes of his middle and late periods. These works define him as a Midwestern romantic, realist painter. Although he spent the greater portion of his active years in Cincinnati, he traveled widely north and west of Ohio and also to the upper ranges of the Mississippi River. In 1851a Cincinnati patron financed his painting trip to New Hampshire and Vermont. Later William Miller, a miniaturist, and friend of Duncanson, wrote that during a visit to Cincinnati, he observed that Duncanson was executing beautiful Italian landscapes from sketches he had made while traveling in Europe in 1853.

During the early 1860s, Duncanson traveled north, painting and sketching in Minnesota and Vermont, and crossing into Canada. Duncanson’s second trip to Europe, as well as his Canadian sojourn, were motivated by his increasing unhappiness in the United States and a supposed desire to leave. In 1861 or 1862Duncanson went to Scotland. His name is not listed in the Cincinnati or Detroit city directories from 1864 to 1866, and it is likely that he wished to leave the United States during the Civil War.

By 1867 Duncanson had returned to this country and began exhibiting works directly inspired by his European travels. He made a final trip to Scotland in the years 1870 to 1871, and completed a number of paintings during his stay. Back in the United States by the summer of 1871, Duncanson exhibited his Scottish paintings with remarkable success. By all indications, Duncanson’s career was flourishing, and his paintings commanded up to five hundred dollars each, a very high sum for the time.

Unfortunately, when his career seemed brightest, he succumbed to emotional illness. His mental collapse occurred during the summer of 1872 while the artist was arranging an exhibition of his works in Detroit. He was hospitalized for three months at the Michigan State Retreat, and on December 21, 1872, he died. Duncanson’s obituary in The Detroit Tribune of December 29, 1872, stated that, ​“He had acquired the idea that in all his artistic efforts he was aided by the spirits of the great masters.” The problems of a biracial person in pre- and post-Civil War America, as well as his concern for his status as an artist, may have contributed to Duncanson’s breakdown. So too may have Duncanson’s seemingly irreconcilable conflicts between the romantic and realistic tendencies in his paintings. Perhaps it was the romantic realm in which Duncanson sought to escape from the harsh realities of prejudice.

Regenia A. Perry Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992)

Robert S. Duncanson was one of the few landscape painters of African American descent to achieve international recognition. His father was a Canadian of Scottish descent, and his mother was black. He spent his teenage years as a house painter in Monroe, Michigan, but moved to Cincinnati in 1840 to become an artist (The Taft Museum, Hudson Hill Press, 1995). His work attracted the attention of Nicholas Longworth, a wealthy landowner and patron who had supported the sculptor Hiram Powers. Longworth commissioned Duncanson to paint a series of murals in his home and, with other prominent Cincinnati residents, sponsored the young artist’s trip to Europe. Duncanson felt his own paintings measured up to the work of European artists, commenting that ​“of all the landscapes I saw in Europe (and I saw thousands) I do not feel discouraged.” (1854, Platt R. Spencer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, quoted in ​“Robert Duncanson: The Late Literary Landscape Paintings,” Ketner, American Art Journal, Winter 1983)