Johnson’s moving painting of a family fleeing slavery places the courage of African-Americans center stage.
Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, c. 1862, oil on paperboard, 55.8 x 66.4 cm (Brooklyn Museum). Speakers: Margarita Karasoulas, Assistant Curator of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Steven Zucker
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re standing in the galleries of the Brooklyn Museum, looking at Eastman Johnson’s “A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves.” This was painted about 1862. This is in the middle of the Civil War.
Margarita Karasoulas: [0:17] The central drama of the work is encapsulated in this family unit, particularly the figure of the father and the mother who are in profile, facing opposite directions.
Dr. Zucker: [0:27] They’re looking out because what they’re doing is really dangerous. This is a family of slaves that is escaping to the Union line, that is, escaping to territory that’s controlled by the North.
Margarita: [0:37] The scene that’s depicted is of an early-morning battlefield. There are glints of light reflecting off of the bayonets in the background. We know that this was a scene that Johnson claims to have witnessed directly.
Dr. Zucker: [0:48] It’s such a sympathetic image, our heart immediately goes out to this family.
Margarita: [0:52] The figures are not caricatures of an African American family, but rather they’re sympathetically rendered. What’s particularly unique about this work is that in the history of genre painting, most American artists tended to include African American figures as marginal to the scene, quite literally pushing them to the margins of the composition.
[1:11] Here, Johnson has placed this family squarely in the center of the canvas.
Dr. Zucker: [1:16] The artist has almost silhouetted these figures, we have to look closely to make out any details.
Margarita: [1:23] But we are able to get a sense of the resolve of the father, perhaps a sense of palpable anxiety on the part of the mother, and the horse that’s galloping, which also conveys this urgency.
Dr. Zucker: [1:34] I love how the artist has placed our viewpoint looking up, and there’s a real sense of drama and clarity, even given the mists of the morning.
Margarita: [1:42] Johnson has captured a radical act of self-emancipation.
Dr. Zucker: [1:46] When I was in grade school, I was taught that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. That it was an act of the American government.
Margarita: [1:53] The figure of Abraham Lincoln as someone who freed the slaves is something that is very pervasive during this time period. There’s also the image of the supplicant slave pleading for their own emancipation, and that’s why this is so radical, because we see this African American family striving and actively pursuing their own freedom.
Dr. Zucker: [2:13] It’s fascinating as a result to think about the fact that this painting was never exhibited. It could’ve been exhibited, but the artist must have held it back.
Margarita: [2:21] Yes, both the painting in Brooklyn’s collection as well as in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as well as another version which is now lost, were never publicly exhibited. They were never sold. In fact, they remained in the artist’s possession at the time of his death.
Dr. Zucker: [2:34] This painting needs to be understood within its political context, but even within a legal context.
Margarita: [2:39] The Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, and essentially any enslaved individuals who left the South had to be returned to their owners.
Dr. Zucker: [2:48] But with the hostilities of the Civil War, the Fugitive Slave Act became null and void. And in the year before this painting was made, a Union general declared that any slave that was able to cross to Union lines would be considered contraband of war. It meant that they were no longer property under Southern rule.
[3:05] Historians have sometimes noted that fugitive slaves were of great benefit to the Union Army. They provided intelligence based on their deep understanding of the topography, the whereabouts of troops, and other critical information.
Margarita: [3:19] They also fought in the war themselves.
Dr. Zucker: [3:21] I wonder what the reception would have been had Eastman Johnson shown this painting publicly in the year that it was painted.
Margarita: [3:28] I also wonder that, and I wonder to what extent Northerners might have read a particular meaning or message from this work, as opposed to that of the Confederate South.
Dr. Zucker: [3:36] In practice, this family is entering into a great unknown. They’re leaving the world that they’ve known, but the trauma of that world was such that it necessitated this escape.
[3:47] [music]
At the time of the Civil War
Today, Eastman Johnson is most well known for the small genre paintings he completed during the middle of the nineteenth century. In several of these images—Old Kentucky Home–Negro Life in the South (1859) is a good example—Johnson focused on the status of race in the United States right about the time of the American Civil War. If this was the first painting he completed that centered attention on the issues of slavery and race in America, then A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves is perhaps a just as famous second.
Eastman Johnson, Old Kentucky Home—Negro Life at the South, 1859, oil on canvas, 36 x 45.25 inches (New York Historical Society)
Enslaved family crossing the battlefield
In A Ride for Liberty, Johnson recreates an event commonly seen during the American Civil War, that of enslaved people crossing battlefields from the Confederate South to the Union North in order to escape the horrors of their bondage. In this painting, Johnson depicts three African Americans—presumably a family consisting of a father, mother, and small child—on horseback. The horse gallops from right to left across the nearly barren battlefield. Each family member looks in a different direction. The father, ahead to the promise of the future, the wife looks back to the hardships of the past, while the child stares downwards at the excitement of the present.
Family (detail), Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, c. 1862, oil on paper board, 55.8 x 66.4 cm (Brooklyn Museum)
A comparison
In addition to the directions of their gazes, the placement of the figures on the canvas has importance. Previous artists often depicted African Americans on the edge of the composition as if to marginalize their importance. William Sidney Mount’s The Power of Music (1847) is but one example. In contrast, Johnson chose instead to focus the composition on the African Americans and their dramatic escape to the free North. The sympathetic depiction and the year in which it was painted—1862—strongly speaks to this image being one that visually speaks to the Union causes in the American Civil War, and more specifically to the abolition of slavery.
William Sidney Mount, The Power of Music, 1847, oil on canvas, 67 x 78 cm (The Cleveland Museum of Art)
Seen firsthand
Moreover, Johnson later claimed that this panting was not an artistic flight of fancy, but was instead an accurate rendering of something he saw firsthand. The event he depicted happened on 2 March 1862 on the battlefield in Manassas, Virginia. In the left background, Johnson recreated the Union army, then under the command of General McClellan. As McClellan marched southward, enslaved people often fled to cross his Union lines and secure their freedom.
Union army in the background (detail), Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, c. 1862, oil on paper board, 55.8 x 66.4 cm (Brooklyn Museum)
White socks?
On close examination, further details emerge. During the time period surrounding the Civil War, horses were often characterized by the number of “white socks” they had. It was then believed that the fewer the number of white socks, the greater a horse’s value. Indeed, during the middle of the nineteenth century horse traders believed there was a direct relationship between the amount of white on a horse’s lower limbs and its stamina. Thus, a horse having only one—or more preferably, none at all—white sock would increase its potential value. When applying this to Johnson’s painting, we can observe that the horse the soon-to-be-free enslaved family ride has only one white sock, and it is a small one at that. This indicates—for the nineteenth-century viewer, at least—that the horse has been stolen in this noble cause was both valuable and of good breeding.
From Maine to Dusseldorf
Without doubt, Johnson’s life experiences impacted the subjects he aspired to paint. He was born in Lovell, Maine—a free state, of course—and later moved to Washington, D.C., a locale with both free and enslaved populations. Johnson’s formal artistic education began at the age of sixteen when he was apprenticed with a Boston lithographer. In 1845, Johnson moved to the nation’s capital and began completing portraits, demonstrating nearly equal skill in chalk, crayon, and charcoal. The fact that Johnson could support himself from his art without extensive formal instruction at such an early age is a profound testament to his innate artistic skill.
Since colonial times, artists from North America have traveled abroad in search of artistic instruction. During the 18th century, for example, American artists traveled to London to study in the studio of Benjamin West. John Vanderlyn broke this trend by travelling to Paris and studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. During the middle of the nineteenth century, however, artists began to travel further east into the continent in search of innovative artistic instruction. In 1849 Johnson joined other international artists in Germany to study at the Düsseldorf Akademie, an institution that specialized in instruction in genre and landscape painting. During his two-year stay in Germany, Johnson became acquainted with Emanuel Leutze, and both painted small genre paintings. After his tenure at the Düsseldorf Akademie, Johnson continued his international studies at The Hague for three years. His deep admiration and emulation of Dutch painters earned him the nickname of “American Rembrandt.”
A sympathetic treatment
However, the subject matter of the Dutch Rembrandt and the American Rembrandt were clearly very different. Indeed, Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves is different from much of the art seen even in antebellum United States. The artistic focus on African Americans during the Civil War was not completely new—Winslow Homer’s art from the early 1860s comes to mind—but Eastman’s sympathetic treatment was relatively rare. Rather than pushing African Americans to the border of the composition, Johnson instead focuses the composition on their plight. In all, this composition forcefully and clearly speaks to the abolition of slavery and the Union cause in the American Civil War. As such, A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slave, maintains a justifiable position in the history of American art.
