6. Justice: Black Landscapes and Early Environmental Justice

Braddock, Alan C.

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6. Justice: Black Landscapes and Early Environmental Justice

Alan C. Braddock

Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

In September 1982, residents of Warren County, North Carolina, protested the state government’s decision to allow the disposal of soil contaminated with toxic PCBs...

Author

Alan C. Braddock

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341.7

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23304

Chapter subject tags:EcocriticismEnvironmental justiceAfrican American artistsBannister, Edward Mitchell, 1828-1901Ecology in artLandscape painting, American--19th century

6. Justice: Black Landscapes and Early Environmental Justice

justice, n.
I. 1. Maintenance of what is just or right by the exercise of authority or power; assignment of deserved reward or punishment; giving of due deserts.
III. 7. The quality of being just or right, as a human or divine attribute; moral uprightness; just behaviour or dealing as a concept or principle (one of the four cardinal virtues: cf. cardinal adj. 1); the exhibition of this quality or principle in action; integrity, rectitude.
III. 9. a. Conformity (of an action or thing) to moral right, or to reason, truth, or fact; rightfulness; fairness; correctness; validity.

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In September 1982, residents of Warren County, North Carolina, protested the state government’s decision to allow the disposal of soil contaminated with toxic PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, at a landfill facility in their predominantly Black community—a decision made without local input. By the 1970s, PCBs, used in various industrial operations, were widely known to be carcinogenic—a fact that prompted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban their manufacture in 1979. Concerned about the impact of dumping on their local water supply, between four and five hundred Warren County residents engaged in weeks of nonviolent demonstrations. In one such demonstration, documented in a photograph by the journalist Jenny Labalme, protesters lay down on a roadway to block dump trucks carrying toxic waste to the landfill (fig. 1). This and other acts of resistance were not immediately successful, as dumping at the facility continued for more than a decade, but historians now generally regard the events at Warren County as marking a turning point in the crystallization of environmental justice as an idea. Toxic pollution had disproportionately affected marginalized communities before in the United States and elsewhere—as in the notorious Minamata mercury poisoning case in Japan during the middle decades of the twentieth century—but the protests by Warren County residents were unprecedented. Indeed, their acts of civil disobedience predated by several years the popular use of “environmental justice” as a descriptor of equity and fairness in the distribution of ecological burdens and benefits. According to historian Robert D. Bullard, the leading scholar in this field, the Warren County case “catapulted the environmental justice movement into the limelight.”1 Robert D. Bullard, ed., The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2005), 19–20, 38–42; quotation on page 19. See also Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990). For general background, see Esme G. Murdock, “A History of Environmental Justice: Foundations, Narratives, and Perspectives,” in Environmental Justice: Key Issues, ed. Brendan Coolsaet, with a foreword by Robert D. Bullard (New York: Routledge, 2021), 7–8. On the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ban of PCB production, see “EPA Bans PCB Manufacture; Phases Out Uses,” press release, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, April 19, 1979. On PCBs classified as carcinogenic, see Béatrice Lauby-Secretan et al., “Carcinogenicity of Polychlorinated Biphenyls Polybrominated Biphenyls,” Lancet Oncology, April 14, 2013, 287–88. On the Minamata case, see S. Timothy George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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Description: Residents of Warren County, North Carolina, protesting against the dumping of...

Fig. 1. Jenny Labalme, Residents of Warren County, North Carolina, protesting against the dumping of hazardous PCBs at a local landfill, 1982. Collection of the artist

A key activist in galvanizing the movement was Benjamin Chavis, a former assistant to Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) in the struggle for civil rights and a field officer for the United Church of Christ. After participating in the Warren County protests, Chavis invoked “environmental justice” in 1987 in his report for the United Church of Christ titled Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, which revealed a systemic pattern of racial discrimination in the siting of dumps and industrial facilities across the United States. In Chavis’s words, “It is our hope that this information will be used by all persons committed to racial and environmental justice to challenge what we believe to be an insidious form of racism.” By this time, “environmental justice” had entered public discourse, appearing in numerous articles, books, and events. The exact moment of the term’s first articulation is unknown, but its usage developed directly in connection with the struggle for civil rights. Its relative newness may explain why the Oxford English Dictionary still does not contain an entry for “environmental justice” (including among its many “compound” terms), even though the term has become firmly established in the lexicon of environmental ethics.2 Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: Commission for Racial Justice, United Church of Christ, 1987), ix. Early uses of the term include Joseph A. Page and Gary B. Sellers, “Occupational Safety and Health: Environmental Justice for the Forgotten American,” Kentucky Law Journal 59, no. 1 (1970): 114–45; Richard G. Bond, “Salvationists, Utilitarians, and Environmental Justice,” Ramapo Papers 1, no. 2 (1976): 1–38; Eileen Cooper, “Protest over Toxic Waste Site,” New York Times, February 8, 1981 (referring to PCBs and “environmental justice” at Beacon Falls, Conn.); Devajyoti Deka, “Social and Environmental Justice Issues in Urban Transportation,” in The Geography of Urban Transportation, ed. Susan Hanson (New York: Guilford, 1986); and Peter S. Wenz, Environmental Justice (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). For an encyclopedia entry, see Robert M. Figueroa, “Environmental Justice,” in Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: A Global Resource, ed. J. Britt Holbrook (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Cengage, 2015), 129–36.

An important watershed in the public recognition and dissemination of “environmental justice” occurred in 1991 at the First National People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit, held in Washington, D.C., where a declaration of seventeen “Principles of Environmental Justice” began with this Preamble:

we, the people of color, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; to ensure environmental justice; to promote economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and, to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples, do affirm and adopt these Principles of Environmental Justice.3 “Principles of Environmental Justice,” in Adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, Washington, DC, October 1991 (New York: United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1991), reprinted in Sharing the Earth: An International Environmental Justice Reader, ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Modhumita Roy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 279–80.

The ensuing principles asserted that public policy must be “based on mutual respect,” “responsible uses of land” for “humans and other living things,” protection from nuclear and other “toxic/hazardous wastes,” “self-determination of all peoples,” accountability for “producers” of environmental toxins, equal participation in environmental assessment, a “safe and healthy work environment,” “full compensation and reparations” for environmental damages, alignment of environmental justice with international law, recognition of the “sovereignty” of “Native Peoples,” attention to both “cities and rural areas,” halting of involuntary medical procedures on people of color, opposition to “destructive operations of multi-national corporations” as well as repressive “military occupation,” education on “social and environmental issues,” and reprioritization of “consumer choices” and “life styles” to “ensure the health of the natural world for present and future generations.” Although inspired by recent events such as those in Warren County, the authors clearly envisioned environmental justice issues as having a broad geographical scope and deep history rooted in centuries of European colonialism.4 For a recent study connecting such issues, see Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021).

In the decades since that summit, environmental justice has reshaped environmentalism by highlighting issues of human inequity in tandem with concerns about nonhuman life to produce a more comprehensive ecological vision—one that has now become institutionalized. For example, under the leadership of Michael Regan, the African American former secretary of environment quality of North Carolina, the Environmental Protection Agency now explicitly addresses environmental justice as part of its purview. The agency officially defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” Moreover, the EPA underscores that such a goal is achievable “when everyone enjoys . . . the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards, and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.” Similar institutional initiatives recognizing environmental justice as an essential part of environmental policy have appeared lately in the international arena. In 2020, the United Nations declared the theme of its International Day for the Eradication of Poverty to be “acting together to achieve social and environmental justice for all.” In 2022, the U.N. Development Program announced “Five Steps to Environmental Justice” as part of a coordinated environmental justice strategy.5 On Regan and the current official definition of environmental justice, see “Environmental Justice,” www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice, last updated September 30, 2022. For the United Nations initiatives, see “Social and Environmental Justice for All,” September 23, 2020, https://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/2020/09/international-day-for-the-eradication-of-poverty-17-october-2020/; and “Five Steps to Environmental Justice,” June 23, 2022, https://www.undp.org/blog/five-steps-environmental-justice.

With this brief history of environmental justice discourse and activism in mind, let us return to the photograph of Warren County residents protesting in 1982, for it reveals important visual and corporeal dimensions that deserve scrutiny in the context of the present chapter. By laying their bodies down on the pavement in front of dump trucks carrying toxic waste, residents engaged in a peaceful but powerful expression of environmental justice through biopolitical resistance simply by being visible and present in a place where the dominant culture wished to silence them and deny their humanity. That unequal structure of relations brings to mind an observation by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, describing the institution of slavery as “one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation.” Dumping toxic chemicals in communities of color has effectively extended such experimentation in an ongoing state of exception that excludes Black people from norms of humanity and environmental protection enjoyed by other citizens. Conversely, the protesters’ visible and corporeal challenge to this coercive, discriminatory state constituted what Mbembe calls an assertion of “sovereignty” demonstrating the “protean capabilities of the human bond through . . . the body itself.” While visuality and corporeality might seem tangential to the advancement of environmental justice in law and policy, recent events have confirmed the importance of creative, embodied expression as a key factor in bringing about historic change.6 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 74–76.

For example, where I live, in Richmond, Virginia, artistic and corporeal assertions of justice—specifically reclaiming racially exclusionary environments—became an international cause célèbre in 2020 amid the international groundswell of Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Creative appropriation of Confederate memorials, most notably one dedicated to Robert E. Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, attracted global attention when demonstrators joyously occupied and reinterpreted this landmark of White supremacist ideology in various ways—through music, light projections, conversation, and dance (fig. 2). Did these creative demonstrations only assert social justice or did they also entail an element of environmental justice? Is it even possible to disentangle the social from the environmental in such a context or are they intractably implicated?7 Regarding protests in Richmond, Virginia, on Monument Avenue in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, see Jessica Stewart, “Powerful BLM Video Projections Help Reclaim Controversial Robert E. Lee Monument” [interview with artist Dustin Klein], My Modern Met, July 28, 2020; and Lydia Murray, “Meet Ava Holloway and Kennedy George, the Teens Whose Photo Dancing on a Confederate Statue Went Viral,” Dance Magazine, July 30, 2020.

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Description: Ballet performance at the Robert E. Lee Memorial, Richmond, Virginia by Holliday,...

Fig. 2. Ava Holliday and Kennedy George, Ballet performance at the Robert E. Lee Memorial, Richmond, Virginia, June 5, 2020. Photograph by Julia Rendleman / Reuters Pictures

To answer these questions we must recall that the Confederate memorials functioned not only symbolically but also materially as guardians of racial segregation in ostensibly public spaces of memory and ornamental “nature.” Conceived as part of a Jim Crow–era real estate development, Monument Avenue and its surrounding neighborhood was by municipal law a Whites-only public space, where African Americans were denied access—and by implication their full humanity—while being relegated to poor, underserved, and polluted Richmond neighborhoods like Jackson Ward. Early twentieth-century newspaper advertisements explicitly promised, “No lots can ever be sold or rented in monument avenue park to any person of African descent.” Far from being mere hollow symbols without power or importance, the avenue’s Confederate statues functioned palpably for decades as commercial enticements and sentinels of social order for privileged White residents seeking a homogeneous enclave undisturbed by racial and economic difference. Such residents hardly needed to articulate their discriminatory intentions; instead, they simply relied on these silent sculptural custodians of the Lost Cause to provide a constant reminder of prevailing segregationist laws—passed long after the Civil War—prohibiting African Americans from entering and owning property in the area. Situated on parklike grassy areas along the manicured thoroughfare of grand residences, the monuments were at once physically menacing and psychologically toxic for people of color in reinforcing legal, social, and environmental barriers.8 On the Confederate memorials of Monument Avenue as part of a Jim Crow–era segregationist real estate venture with material consequences, see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 129–61; and Kevin M. Levin, “Richmond’s Confederate Monuments Were Used to Sell a Segregated Neighborhood,” Atlantic, June 11, 2020. For an example of the racist real estate advertisement, see Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 17, 1913, 11.

Indeed, a growing body of research in psychology and sociology now underscores the corrosive impacts of racism on bodies and minds. As noted by Linda Villarosa in Under the Skin (2022), neuroendocrinologists examining the body’s release of disruptive hormones in response to sustained stress have observed unusually high “allostatic load” scores among African American test subjects. Summarizing such research, Villarosa says, “Stress associated with racism weathers the body at the biological level.” Confederate memorials in public plazas serve to extend such stress, compounding what the American studies scholar George Lipsitz once described as the “racialization of space and the spatialization of race.” Not unlike PCBs, the bronze generals of Monument Avenue polluted the city of Richmond for decades with a noxious, debilitating form of racial slow violence—an elite corollary to lynching and other more garish spectacles of violence during the period. The dramatic, defiant assertions of sovereignty and corporeal presence by Black residents in 2020 constituted a powerful, pent-up expression of social and environmental justice. To dismiss the historic importance of such expression or to downplay the statues’ removal as merely “symbolic” grossly underestimates the material implications of these liberating actions, not to mention the political power of art.9 Linda Villarosa, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation (New York: Doubleday, 2022), 83–84; George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 10–23. See also D. Phoung Do, Lindsay R. B. Locklar, and Paul Florsheim, “Triple Jeopardy: The Joint Impact of Racial Segregation and Neighborhood Poverty on the Mental Health of Black Americans,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 54 (2019): 533–41; and Elyes Hanafi, “Spatial Imagination Not for All: The Case of African Americans,” Journal of Psychohistory 45, no. 4 (2018): 267–88. A study that interprets Confederate monuments as merely symbolic and inconsequential is Todd Cronan and Charles Palermo, “Take It Down! Symbolic Politics Is Just That,” Common Dreams, July 2020. For the broader context of spatial politics and the consequences of racial exclusion, see Richard H. Schein, ed., Landscape and Race in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2006).

BLACK LANDSCAPES

What can ecocritical art history reveal about past creative assertions of environmental justice? Instead of searching for rare and isolated acts of historical defiance against the Confederate monuments, the present chapter revisits the work of a nineteenth-century Black landscape artist, Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828–1901), for evidence of environmental justice as a visual-corporeal concern long before the term “environmental justice” came into being. Bannister was one of three African American landscape painters to achieve national success during the period, along with Robert S. Duncanson (1821–1872) and Grafton Tyler Brown (1841–1918). Each of these artists became associated with a particular region in North America, but all achieved professional prominence despite pervasive racism and segregation in the United States. In recent scholarship on African American art history, they have become familiar as a kind of triumvirate, evincing previously unrecognized diversity within the nineteenth-century American art world’s leading genre. Duncanson, born in Upstate New York to Black parents descended from freed Virginia slaves, grew up in Ohio, but he pursued a career in painting that took him from Cincinnati to Detroit, Montreal, Europe, and back again. As an important member of the Hudson River School, he brought a romantic sensibility to depicting mythic literary scenes and specific real places in the East. Brown, the son of freed Blacks from Maryland, grew up in Pennsylvania and apprenticed as a lithographer in a Philadelphia printing shop before moving across the country to San Francisco in 1858. By the 1880s, after making printed maps and illustrations for two decades, he developed a reputation in the Bay Area and elsewhere for painting dramatic western wilderness scenes, expanding his repertoire based on travels through British Columbia, the Cascade Mountains, Yosemite, and Yellowstone National Park.10 For general discussion of the artists’ careers, see Lisa Farrington, African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 83–91; and Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 19–53. On Duncanson, see also Joseph D. Ketner, Robert S. Duncanson: Emergence of the African American Artist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993); and David Lubin, “Reconstructing Duncanson,” in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 107–57. Regarding Bannister, see Naurice Frank Woods, Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Art: The Ascendancy of Robert Duncanson, Edward Bannister, and Edmonia Lewis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021), 75–123; and Juanita Marie Holland, “Reaching through the Veil: African-American Artist Edward Mitchell Bannister,” in Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828–1901 (New York: Kenkeleba House, 1992), 17–66. For a comprehensive monograph on Brown, see Robert Chandler, San Francisco Lithographer: African American Artist Grafton Tyler Brown (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014).

Unlike Duncanson and Brown—both studio-based artists rooted in American romanticism—Bannister embraced the signature method of the French Barbizon School, namely sketching and painting regularly en plein air, or outdoors in the open air. Such a method presupposed the artist’s bodily presence in, and direct observation of, the depicted environment during the artistic process. Like the French Barbizon artists, Bannister also worked in a studio, refining his vision by translating to canvas his memories of witnessing the rural countryside, but the process of landscape painting for him began outdoors. Bannister’s artistic practice therefore entailed something more than representation of this or that subject matter: it involved asserting his right of access to public space in Jim Crow America. For example, a photograph taken by Jonas Bergner in 1887 shows Bannister at work, along the water’s edge at Battery Park, Newport, Rhode Island, painting a picture of the U.S.S. Richmond, a military vessel celebrated for its Union naval duty during the Civil War (fig. 3). Bannister’s plein air method went hand in hand with an artistic philosophy informed by German idealism, transcendentalist spirituality, and an avowed commitment to racial equality. As I argue in the remainder of this chapter, Bannister’s distinctive artistic orientation along with his documented public activism in behalf of racial equality make him particularly relevant to what I would call the rich prehistory of environmental justice avant la lettre—that is, before “environmental justice” became a consciously articulated term and discourse in the twentieth century. Bannister certainly was not the only artist who invites historical consideration in these terms; rather, his achievement provides one model for ecocritical rethinking of past art and its environmental justice implications.11 For the Bergner photograph, see Newport Historical Society Collections Online, Object number P39, https://collections.newporthistory.org/Detail/objects/2639. On German idealism and transcendentalism in relation to this artist, see Traci Costa, “Edward Mitchell Bannister and the Aesthetics of Idealism,” in Locating American Art: Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums, Colonial to Present, ed. Cynthia Fowler (New York: Routledge, 2016), 89–108.

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Description: Edward Mitchell Bannister at Battery Park, Newport, Rhode Island by Bergner, Jonas

Fig. 3. Jonas Bergner, Edward Mitchell Bannister at Battery Park, Newport, Rhode Island, 1887. Photograph, Newport Historical Society, Rhode Island

Bannister was born in Canada in 1828 at a New Brunswick town named Saint Andrews, just over the Saint Croix River from eastern Maine, near Eastport. His father was a Black laborer from Barbados, and his mother was from Saint Andrews, possibly of Scottish descent. Both parents died by the time Bannister reached adolescence, leaving him orphaned in the care of a wealthy local lawyer, Harris Hatch (1780–1856), a White man whose Loyalist parents had moved to Canada from Boston during the American Revolution. At Hatch’s farm, young Bannister did chores, read books, and taught himself to draw. In his late teens, he found work for several years on fishing boats and other coastal vessels, serving as a cook and learning to sail. Moving to Boston by 1850, Bannister began to study painting, drawing, and photography while supporting himself as a hairdresser in the employment of Christiana Carteaux (1819–1902), a successful entrepreneur and abolitionist of African and Indigenous Narragansett ancestry from Rhode Island who operated popular hairstyling salons in Boston and Providence. Bannister painted her portrait shortly after they married in 1857. By this time, around the age of thirty, Bannister was receiving commissions for other portraits within Boston’s Black community and appearing in the city directory listed as an artist.12 For biographical information on Bannister, see Bearden and Henderson, History of African American Artists, 40–51; and Holland, “Reaching through the Veil,” 17–57. On Hatch, see his biographical entry in Council of Archives New Brunswick, https://search.canbarchives.ca/harris-hatch. On Christiana Carteaux, see Jane Lancaster, “‘I Would Have Made Out Very Poorly Had It Not Been for Her’: The Life and Work of Christiana Bannister, Hair Doctress and Philanthropist,” Rhode Island History 59, no. 4 (2001): 102–21. For a reproduction of Bannister’s portrait of his wife, now in the RISD Museum, see https://risdmuseum.org/art-design/collection/portrait-christiana-carteaux-bannister-2016381.

During the Civil War era, the Bannisters regularly engaged in political activism, participating in antislavery events. Edward sang with the Crispus Attucks Glee Club at abolitionist gatherings, served as an officer in the Association for the Relief of Destitute Contrabands and at the Convention of New England Colored Citizens, joined celebrations of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, donated a (lost) portrait of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1837–1863), the White abolitionist commander of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment of Colored Troops, to raise funds for a Soldiers Relief Fair in 1864, and marshaled a demonstration in 1865 in Boston Common under the banner “Equal rights for all men,” among other activities. Christiana was active in abolitionist women’s organizations, such as the Colored Ladies Sanitary Commission of Boston, working to alleviate pay inequities between White and Black Union soldiers. Together, Edward and Christiana Bannister lived for two years with Lewis Hayden (1811–1889), an abolitionist and formerly enslaved man involved with Boston’s Underground Railroad. In terms of Black progressive activism, the Bannisters were a power couple.13 For references to Bannister taking part in various antislavery events, see Liberator (Boston), February 26, 1858, 35; March 5, 1858, 39; August 19, 1859, 132; December 26, 1862, 207; December 15, 1863, 207; and “The Seventeenth June,” Boston Post, June 19, 1865. On Bannister’s donation of the Shaw portrait, see Liberator, October 21, 1864, 170. Additional discussion of Bannister’s activism appears in Woods, Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Art, 77–85. For detailed examination of Christiana Bannister’s activism, see Lancaster, “‘I Would Have Made Out Very Poorly.’”

Also during the wartime period, from 1863 to 1865, Bannister rented space in Boston’s Studio Building, where a number of prominent White artists worked at the time, including William Morris Hunt (1824–1879), John La Farge (1835–1910), and Elihu Vedder (1836–1923). Hunt had recently returned from France, where he studied with the famous Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) and worked alongside like-minded artists producing rural landscapes and genre scenes in the forest of Fontainebleau outside Paris. The vogue for Barbizon painting in Boston, promoted by Hunt, helps explain Bannister’s newfound interest in the style. As the art historian Juanita Holland notes, Bannister also probably saw exhibitions of Barbizon painting at the Boston Athenaeum and the Allston Club (located in the Studio Building) during the 1850s and 1860s. Since the Athenaeum advertised its exhibitions in the Liberator, a prominent abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), Bannister may have viewed the institution as both an aesthetic and political ally.14 Holland, “Reaching through the Veil,” 18, 27, 39. A notice in the Boston Daily Advertiser, April 26, 1866, 1, for the “First Exhibition of Works of Art” at the Allston Club refers to unnamed works by Daubigny, Corot, Rousseau, and numerous other “Distinguished Artists.” For more on Hunt and the taste for Barbizon painting in Boston during this period, see Nancy Allyn Jarzombek, Boston Art Club, 1855–1950 (Boston: Vose Galleries, 2000), 4–5, 9, 66, 67, 71, 72, 81, 84; Daniel Rosenfeld and Robert G. Workman, The Spirit of Barbizon: France and America (Providence, R.I.: Rhode Island School of Design, 1986).

PROVIDENCE AND PLEIN AIR

In 1869, the Bannisters moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where Edward had professional connections in the art world and Christiana maintained family and business ties. According to a later newspaper account, the artist “found the climate of Providence more suitable to his condition of health” than that of Boston, but it specified no medical condition, apart from occasional memory loss associated with an unidentified “malady he contracted when in the daguerreotype business” in New York City during the 1850s. The “climate of Providence” could refer to either meteorological or social conditions, but the latter more likely influenced Bannister, since both cities were on the Atlantic Coast and separated by only fifty miles. Indeed, Holland has suggested that the artist’s driving motivation in moving to Providence was Boston’s increasingly inhospitable climate of racial tensions in the post–Civil War period, notably in the city’s segregated public transportation system. By contrast, Rhode Island, even with its deep historical entanglement in the colonial slave trade and ongoing racial divisions in many areas, may have seemed marginally more welcoming to the Bannisters as people of color. In 1866, for example, Rhode Island schools had desegregated. In 1885, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Rhode Island legislature passed General Law Chapter 508, prohibiting racial discrimination in public places. The law declared, “No person within the jurisdiction of this state shall be debarred from the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of any licensed inns, public conveyances, on land or water, or from any licensed places of public amusement, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”15 On the move to Providence and other biographical details, see “Died in Church: Edward M. Bannister, Well-Known Colored Artist of This City, Stricken,” Providence Journal, January 11, 1901, 8, which identifies “heart disease” as his cause of death. See also Holland, “Reaching through the Veil,” 27. For the law of 1855, see “January Session, 1885—Chapter 508,” Public Laws of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations Passed at the Sessions of the General Assembly, from January, 1882, to May, 1885, Inclusive (Providence: Office of the Secretary of State, 1885), 257–58.

Most Rhode Island cities, towns, and institutions remained de facto racially divided and often exclusionary in practice, however. As W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) observed in 1901, “North as well as South the negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights. Their history since has been the history of the gradual but by no means complete breaking down of remaining barriers.” According to the authors of a historical report by the Public Archaeology Laboratory, like other northern states Rhode Island “did not have explicitly segregated facilities or schools and Black voters were not systematically disenfranchised,” but “private behavior, market practices, and public policies created and reinforced racial separation and inequality.” Such conditions prompted African Americans in the state to organize and protest discrimination throughout the Jim Crow era, as when the all-Black Sumner Political Club of Newport issued a founding declaration in 1898 stating, “Colored citizens of the city of Newport, state of Rhode Island, are aggrieved. We suffer under the indignity of the policy so many of our fellow citizens who dominate in numbers cast upon on us in the management of public affairs.” Moreover, Rhode Island passed legislation openly hostile to Indigenous people in the state, specifically an act in 1880 abolishing the Narragansett Tribe—Christiana Carteaux Bannister’s community—and taking possession of their reservation land, citing extensive intermarriage between Native and African American people as justification. As a result, while the Bannisters’ relocation to Providence may have allowed them to leave behind the hostile environment of Boston, it hardly entailed an escape from American racism and colonialism.16 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Black North: A Social Study,” New York Times, November 17, 1901; Public Archaeology Laboratory, African American Struggle for Civil Rights in Rhode Island: The Twentieth Century (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, 2019), 3–4; see pages 5–6 for the Sumner Political Club declaration in 1898. For more on the history of civil rights in Rhode Island, including the act of 1880 abolishing the Narragansett Tribe, see Keith W. Stokes and Theresa Guzmán Stokes, A Matter of Truth: The Struggle for African Heritage and Indigenous People Equal Rights in Providence, Rhode Island (1620–2020) (Middletown: Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, 2021), 61–62. See also Geralyn Ducady, “African American Civil Rights in Rhode Island,” in EnCompass: A Digital Sourcebook of Rhode Island History (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society and Providence College, 2016–22), http://library.providence.edu/encompass/african-american-civil-rights-in-rhode-island/african-american-civil-rights-in-rhode-island/.

Artistically speaking, living in Rhode Island facilitated Edward’s shift from portraiture and genre scenes to landscape painting through direct observation and working outdoors in the countryside, en plein air. As Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson explain, “The move to Providence gave Bannister easy access to the rural and wooded areas that are so fundamental to Barbizon painting.” According to recollections about his artistic practice in a newspaper obituary of Bannister published in 1901, “He was fond of strolling about to enjoy the beauties of nature for the purpose of selecting some landscape to reproduce.” Evidence of this plein air approach appears vividly in the many outdoor sketches by Bannister preserved among his papers at the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C. Executed in varying states of finish and a range of media—pencil, charcoal, pastel, gouache, watercolor, and oil—they reveal his insatiable curiosity in exploring outdoor scenery as well as his subtle inventiveness in composition and mood, even though he was largely self-taught (figs. 4, 5).17 Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 44; “Died in Church”; Edward Mitchell Bannister Scrapbook, 1866–1901, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

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Description: Untitled (Landscape sketch) by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 4. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Untitled (Landscape sketch), after 1869. Charcoal and pastel on paper. Bannister Scrapbook, Box 1, Folder 40 of 53, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

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Fig. 5. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Untitled (Landscape sketch), after 1869. Charcoal and pastel on paper. Bannister Scrapbook, Box 1, Folder 31 of 53, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Given the realities of Jim Crow America, “strolling about” to observe and depict such scenery had different stakes for an artist of color from those of his White contemporaries. For reasons that will become clearer in a moment, Bannister’s embrace of the Barbizon mode provided him with an important new vehicle for expressing visual and corporeal freedom. Unfortunately, the artist left no diary and many of his works during this second phase of his career remain untitled and undated, making it difficult to trace his day-to-day movements and stylistic trajectory with precision, but the pictures we know he completed in the 1870s reveal a decisive shift toward Barbizon-style plein air painting. A few comparisons with French examples bear this out, even as our knowledge of Bannister and his specific historical context necessarily inflect how we should understand the similarities.18 I thank Maureen O’Brien at the RISD Museum of Art, Nancy Grinnell at the Providence Art Club, and William Vareika of William Vareika Fine Arts in Newport, R.I., for viewing and discussing works by Bannister with me during my visit to Rhode Island in December 2022. As William Vareika informed me, the growing market for Bannister paintings has fostered an unfortunate problem of forgeries and mistaken attributions in some cases. In the opinion of Vareika, a leading authority on the artist, all of the Bannister paintings mentioned in this chapter are securely attributed to the artist—an opinion corroborated by other scholars.

For example, Bannister’s Oak Trees of 1876 (fig. 6) uses a visual lexicon reminiscent of Charles-François Daubigny’s Crossroads of the Eagle’s Nest, Fontainebleau of 1843–44 (fig. 7), including a copse of trees in the middle distance divided by a pathway with solitary traveler in an open clearing. Bannister’s Oak Trees probably resembles a lost painting of the same year titled Under the Oaks, which he submitted to the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, earning him a first-prize medal in a blind competition. In a well-known anecdote recounted by the artist to a friend, George Whitaker (1840–1916), Bannister described how he learned about the award from newspapers, which referred to his prize-winning picture only by its gallery number. He then hurried through a “great crowd” at the prize committee rooms and “jostled among them” to inquire, only to find that “many resented [his] presence.” Initially encountering racial insults from the committee members, Bannister informed them he was the winning artist, at which point they apologized and welcomed him, though some attempted to deprive him of the prize. In light of such racial hostility, which Bannister must have endured constantly, his depiction of Oak Trees aptly projects a countervailing ideal of harmonious open space without crowds or rancor, where a single figure passes freely. The artist probably experienced a version of such freedom when, according to the posthumous newspaper report cited earlier, he painted “from oaks at the William Goddard farm at Potowomut,” a remote rural peninsula in Greenwich Bay, twenty miles south of the urban center of Providence. As a familiar element of Barbizon painting, this sense of unfettered spatial harmony undoubtedly helps to explain Bannister’s attraction to the style, but the figure of a solitary traveler in the open—en plein air, as it were—also invites consideration as a signature motif for the artist himself, an avatar or projection of his own corporeal presence. A similar figure appears frequently in Bannister’s work, often situated on pathways of various kinds, as in Untitled (Landscape, man on horse) of 1884 (fig. 8), Approaching Storm of 1886 (fig. 9), and many other pictures. Not surprisingly, Bannister, like the French painter Daubigny (1817–1878), owned a small boat that he used as a mobile outdoor painting studio, from which he could observe scenery in the open water without jostling crowds or racist insults (figs. 10, 11).19 For Bannister’s account of winning the first-place medal and interaction with the committee, see George Whitaker, “Edward M. Bannister,” typescript, Edward Mitchell Bannister Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 4–5, transcribed in Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists. “Died in Church.” Other instances of Bannister depicting singular figures in open space include the following works (all at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.): Untitled (Landscape, Boat Moored near Stream, Man Walking in Foreground), 1879; Untitled (Landscape, Woodcutter on Path), 1879; Woman Walking Down Path, 1882; Untitled (Man on Path with Trees in Background), 1882; Sunset, 1883; Fisherman by Water, 1886; Untitled (Landscape with Trees and Woman), 1894; Homeward, 1894; and Untitled (Landscape, Woman Carrying Wood), n.d. On the Fanchon, including its purchase from Bannister by a friend named George Bliss, see Holland, “Reaching through the Veil,” 45, 73, 75. I thank Bill Emerson, a descendant of Bliss, for sharing photographs and information about Fanchon, including its identification as a yawl and the likely date of 1891 for Bannister’s sale of the boat to Bliss. Scholars have never explained why Bannister called the vessel Fanchon. According to my research, “Fanchon” has been a European woman’s name for centuries. In 1804, the German romantic composer Friedrich Heinrich Himmel (1765–1814) used it as the title of an opera, or Singspiel. Later in the nineteenth century, the German American conductor and playwright Augustus Waldauer adapted a story by George Sand titled “La Petite Fadette” in writing Fanchon, the Cricket: A Domestic Drama, in Five Acts (Chicago: Dramatic, 1862), which toured widely around the United States. Perhaps a more immediate source of inspiration for Bannister, however, was Mary Mann’s novel Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1887), featuring a Black female character named Fanchon whose mother had been enslaved. As the protagonist of an eponymous chapter in the novel, Fanchon visits Cuba with a character named Madame Cazneau, who once employed her as a servant. During their stay at a local plantation, Fanchon witnesses the enduring horrors of slavery under Spanish rule. Several meticulous mechanical drawings by Bannister, evidently depicting the Fanchon, appear among the artist’s papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

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Description: Oak Trees by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 6. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Oak Trees, 1876. Oil on canvas, 33 7/8 × 60 1/4 in. (86 × 153 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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Description: The Crossroads of the Eagle's Nest, Fontainebleau by Daubigny, Charles...

Fig. 7. Charles-François Daubigny, The Crossroads of the Eagle's Nest, Fontainebleau, 1843–44. Oil on canvas, 35 1/4 × 45 3/4 in. (89.5 × 116.2 cm). Minneapolis Institute of Art

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Description: Untitled (Landscape, Man on Horse) by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 8. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Untitled (Landscape, man on horse), 1884. Oil on canvas, 26 × 40 1/8 in. (66.1 × 101.9 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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Description: Approaching Storm by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 9. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Approaching Storm, 1886. Oil on canvas, 40 1/8 × 60 in. (102 × 152.4 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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Description: The Boat-Studio by Daubigny, Charles François

Fig. 10. Charles-François Daubigny, Le bateau atelier, 1862. Etching, 18 x 12.7 cm. [Antiquarius Gallery, Rome.]

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Description: Edward Mitchell Bannister's yawl Fanchon by Unknown

Fig. 11. Edward Mitchell Bannister's yawl Fanchon, ca. 1891. Courtesy of Bill Emerson.

OPEN AIR

Bannister’s plein air practice and his thematic interest in depicting figures moving freely through open spaces resonate in interesting ways with contemporary verbal discourse about the importance of “open air” in African American writings. For example, in a striking passage of My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) recalled the early childhood years of his enslavement to draw a stark contrast with the violent repression of his adulthood, noting his relative freedom in youth even compared with “white children of the slaveholder”:

The slave-boy escapes many troubles which befall and vex his white brother. He seldom has to listen to lectures on propriety of behavior, or on anything else. . . . His days, when the weather is warm, are spent in the pure, open air, and in the bright sunshine. He always sleeps in airy apartments; he seldom has to take powders, or to be paid to swallow pretty little sugar-coated pills, to cleanse his blood, or to quicken his appetite. He eats no candies; gets no lumps of loaf sugar; always relishes his food; cries but little, for nobody cares for his crying; learns to esteem his bruises but slight, because others so esteem them. In a word, he is, for the most part of the first eight years of his life, a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy, upon whom troubles fall only like water on a duck’s back. And such a boy, so far as I can now remember, was the boy whose life in slavery I am now narrating.20 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855), 42, 43.

For Douglass, openness in childhood thus went hand in hand with relative freedom and independence. Those anodyne conditions did not last for long, but he also referred positively to being in the open in various senses and moments of his life, as when he addressed the reader in the present with his introductory remarks, promising to “discuss the question of Slavery in the light of fundamental principles, and upon facts, notorious and open to all.” Late in the narrative, he expressed his desire “to honor those good men and women for their noble daring, in willingly subjecting themselves to persecution, by openly avowing their participation in the escape of slaves.” In Douglass’s view, being and acting in the open were ethical imperatives intimately associated with resisting racial injustice.21 Douglass, vi, 323–24.

A similar invocation of openness punctuates The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), another important nineteenth-century expression of Black freedom. In one passage, describing a religious gathering at Northampton, Massachusetts, the narrator observes:

The meeting was in the open fields—the full moon shed its saddened light over all—and the woman who was that evening to address them was trembling on the preachers’ stand. . . . Sojourner left the tent alone and unaided, and walking some thirty rods to the top of a small rise of ground commenced to sing, in her most fervent manner, with all the strength of her most powerful voice, the hymn of the resurrection of Christ. . . . All who have ever heard her sing this hymn will probably remember it as long as they remember her. The hymn, the tune, the style, are each too closely associated with to be easily separated from herself, and when sung in one of her most animated moods, in the open air, with the utmost strength of her most powerful voice, must have been truly thrilling.22 Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828, ed. Olive Gilbert (Boston: Printed for the Author, 1850), 116.

As Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883) sang, “she was immediately encircled” by a “mob” of excited young men wielding sticks and clubs, but not with the purpose of threatening her. Rather, they said, “We came to hear you sing.” To this she answered, “You stand and smoke so near me, I cannot sing or talk,” at which “the crowd suddenly gave back” and “the circle became wider.” For Sojourner Truth, “open fields” and “open air” provided the proper setting for righteous spiritual expression through music.23 Truth, 117.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois devoted a long passage to describing the condition of Black farmers in Jim Crow America. Along with stark statistics about poverty rates, illiteracy, and child labor, Du Bois underscored the nearly unrelenting toil faced by African American agricultural workers:

Among this people there is no leisure . . . no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of the careless happy childhood and dreaming youth. . . . The toil, like all farm toil, is monotonous, and here there are little machinery and few tools to relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all this, it is work in the pure open air, and this is something in a day when fresh air is scarce.24 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69–70.

Once again, even in the midst of pervasive racial inequity, “the pure open air” of rural existence offered respite as well as a salubrious contrast to environmental conditions elsewhere in modernity, “when fresh air is scarce.” As the author of The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a major sociological study of Black life in turn-of-the-century urban America, Du Bois was well aware of such environmental conditions, having documented their devastating effects.25 On Du Bois’s environmental awareness, see Scott Hicks, “‘A Thorough Study of Causes’: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, and Progressive Era Materiality,” in A Greene Country Town: Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 141–52.

BEING THERE: THE SPIRITUAL IDEA CENTERING IN ALL CREATED THINGS

Let us consider another telling visual comparison, this time between Bannister’s Tree Landscape of 1877 (fig. 12) and A Tree in the Fontainebleau Forest of 1836–40 (fig. 13) by Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), one of the founding figures of French Barbizon painting. As with Oak Trees, this is obviously not a case of mere copying or even direct influence between the specific pictures in question. Instead, the comparison reveals evidence of a shared artistic method, theme, and attitude, resulting in pictures that captured each painter’s frank yet creative meditation on specific actual trees in their respective New England and French locales. Accordingly, in both paintings, the trees occupy center stage in an undramatic rural environment with palpable atmosphere, registered through both representation and facture. True to the Barbizon method of direct observation and pictorial production outdoors, Bannister’s painting, like Rousseau’s, consists of blunt, unfussy brushstrokes and naturalistic tones that convey an unmistakable sense of being there—visually, bodily, and spiritually.26 On Rousseau and A Tree in the Fontainebleau Forest, a work which apparently has never traveled to the United States, see Greg M. Thomas, Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 56–57.

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Description: Tree Landscape by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 12. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Tree Landscape, 1877. Oil on canvas, 20 1/8 × 29 7/8 in. (51 × 76 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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Description: A Tree in the Fontainebleau Forest by Rousseau, Théodore

Fig. 13. Théodore Rousseau, A Tree in the Fontainebleau Forest, 1836–40. Oil on canvas, 16 1/4 × 21 3/4 in. (41.3 × 55.2 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Statements from both of these artists further confirm a common purpose in approaching sensory phenomena of nature as a source of insight about what they regarded as the fundamental harmony of creation, indicating the international appeal of Barbizon painting as both practice and philosophy. Describing his direct observations en plein air in a declaration recorded by his biographer, Alfred Sensier (1815–1877), around 1872, Rousseau exclaimed:

Oh! silence is golden; when I was at my Belle-Croix observatory, I didn’t dare budge, because silence opened to me the stream of discoveries. The family of the woods would then go into action; it’s the silence that allowed me, immobile as I was like the trunk of a tree, to watch the stag in his lair . . . to observe the habits of the field mouse, the otter, and the salamander, those fantastic amphibians. He who lives in silence becomes the center of a world; for a moment, I could have believed myself the sun of a small creation.27 Alfred Sensier, Souvenirs sur Th. Rousseau (Paris: Leon Trechener, 1872), 120–21, translated in Thomas, Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France, 1.

A decade and a half later, in an unpublished manuscript of a lecture from 1886 titled “The Artist and His Critics,” Bannister made a similar, albeit somewhat more generalized, pronouncement about the value of directly observing nature’s “spiritual idea” and “perfect harmony” through “material facts”:

[The artist] becomes an interpreter in a greater or less degree, according to his natural powers of expression to us of the infinite, subtle qualities of the spiritual idea centering in all created things, expounding for us the laws of beauty, and so far as finite mind and executive ability can; revealing to us glimpses of the absolute idea of perfect harmony. . . . Very few persons trouble themselves about even the material facts in nature with which the artist has to do. Never reading the great three leaved book nature—of land, and sky, and water as the artist reads it, reverently and lovingly, noting all the varying moods of the elements, studying all the various phases of human character about him in the spirit of true sympathy with the strivings, depressions, and aspirations which constitute the sum of the life he sees and knows.28 Edward Mitchell Bannister, “The Artist and His Critics,” April 15, 1886, unpublished lecture manuscript, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Mss. 262, 4–5, 24–25.

As the two statements indicate, these painters believed that an artist’s sympathetic encounter with “the family of the woods” or the “material facts in nature” can yield fundamental discoveries at “the center of a world”—or in “the infinite, subtle qualities of the spiritual idea centering in all created things.” In separate scholarly studies, Greg Thomas and Traci Costa have demonstrated how the beliefs of Rousseau and Bannister respectively were partly rooted in German idealist philosophy, especially the writings of Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), who argued that artists could interpret and transcend the physical world by observing natural phenomena and discerning its underlying spirit or absolute idea. Such transcendentalist thinking often informed critical praise of Bannister’s work, as when his friend George Whitaker wrote, “Time and again he has drawn us away from the realities of life and of the outer world, and by his deep interpretation touched the soul—representing clearly the invisible in the visible.”29 Thomas, Art and Ecology, 196–98, 200; Costa, “Edward Mitchell Bannister and the Aesthetics of Idealism,” 90, 92–97, 98; George Whitaker, “Edward Mitchell Bannister,” undated newspaper clipping, Bannister Scrapbook, box 2, folder 41 of 44.

That airy characterization tells only part of the story, however. Both Rousseau and Bannister brought transcendentalism back down to Earth by imagining nature’s harmony as a model for human relations. As Rousseau said in a letter to Sensier on the eve of the 1848 revolutions in Europe,

Oh, my friend, what a beautiful republic we see there before our eyes [outdoors in nature] and how easy it would be to discipline ourselves as the plants do and, like the rivers, to impose the standard of balances upon ourselves! Will people one day have the good sense to arrange their needs like the perspectives of their sight, to know how to be humble in their plans, soft in their greatness, and logical in their right to live! Is it really so difficult to model oneself on the order that envelops us?30 Sensier, Souvenirs, 165, translated in Thomas, Art and Ecology, 105.

Bannister did not offer a declaration exactly like the Frenchman’s revolutionary prescription for a natural social order, but he clearly articulated an artistic philosophy of engagement with modern life, not transcendentalist idealism or mere spiritual escapism. For example, he asserted unequivocally, “Art is a moral power,” and praised the politically progressive Barbizon realist Jean-François Millet as the “profoundest, tenderest, most sympathetic, and deeply religious spirit of our time.” Art historian Laura Meixner has shown that nineteenth-century American critical reception of Millet tended to celebrate the French artist’s spirituality while downplaying the politics of rural poverty, especially in the United States. Although Meixner does not consider Bannister, her analysis reveals that while his praise of Millet echoed aspects of mainstream American thought, he did not share its strident nationalism or naive idealism. As a Black man who faced racial discrimination, his perspective on Millet’s sympathetic representation of the poor differed from that of privileged and parochial White, nationalistic critics in the United States, for whom the French artist’s indictment of economic inequality ostensibly had no relevance except in Europe. For Bannister and other American progressives, Millet’s “sympathetic” depictions of the French rural poor provided an important visual model for understanding the humanity and living conditions of all impoverished people, including formerly enslaved and disenfranchised African Americans.31 Bannister, “Artist and His Critics,” 3; Laura L. Meixner, “Popular Criticism of Jean-François Millet in Nineteenth-Century America,” Art Bulletin 65, no. 1 (1983): 94–105.

This modern, realist dimension of Bannister’s achievement may help explain other critical comments about his work, including those by his friend and colleague Charles Walter Stetson (1858–1911), who wrote the following in 1880 in a review of the artist:

Mr. Bannister is not very far behind some celebrated Frenchmen, and indeed he resembles them in many respects, although never descending to imitation or affectation. He does not need to affect, he loves nature too deeply. His genius is certainly pastoral; not however, the pastoral of the romanticists and sentimentalists, whose groves are filled with idle, love-lorn shepherd-maids and flocks that need but little care, but the pastoral of the real, every day, toiling world,—of brow-sweat and back-ache, and war with elemental leaven for bread and rest. In some of his landscapes there is a pathetic tenderness, in some a pantheistic spirit surely telling of poetic thoughts.32 [Charles Walter Stetson], “The Art Club Exhibition. II.,” undated newspaper clipping with handwritten inscriptions, “1880” and “by Stetson,” Bannister Scrapbook, box 2, folder 44 of 44.

Stetson, as a cofounder with Bannister of the Providence Art Club (in 1880) and a fellow self-taught artist who faced economic difficulties in advancing his career, must have shared his colleague’s appreciation for “brow-sweat and back-ache.”33 On Stetson, see Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson, ed. Mary Armfield Hill (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985). For more information about Bannister’s role in founding the Providence Art Club, see Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 46–47.

Further evidence of Bannister’s modernity appears elsewhere in his lecture on “The Artist and His Critics”(1886), when he ponders the “Old Masters” of art history. Although he respectfully implored critics to study them deeply, Bannister had no interest in superficial, unthinking reverence for great artists of the past. Instead, he asserted the importance of understanding “the motives which governed them in their work” as well as “the social, religious, and political conditions under which they labored.”34 Bannister, “Artist and His Critics,” 11.

LOW ATMOSPHERE

In another telling indication of Bannister’s tendency to mix transcendentalism with real-world concerns, he linked art and spirituality in a critique of “pecuniary” interests. Specifically, he celebrated “an awakening appreciation of [Art’s] value as a teacher, and its importance as a means of lifting us out of the low atmosphere of sordid gain and narrow selfish ambition into one more ethereal and spiritual.” His reference here to “low atmosphere” as a foil to spirit discloses an implicit environmental logic of moral ranking premised upon perceptions of air quality akin to those of Douglass and Du Bois—perceptions that a Barbizon-style plein air artist would surely have understood from experience and philosophical orientation. Appropriately, the word “sordid,” also invoked here by Bannister, carries similar connotations of something foul, dirty, polluted, and physically corrupt.35 Bannister, 1, 2; “sordid, adj. and n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/184862.

Critical intimations of “low atmosphere,” “sordid gain,” and “selfish ambition” seem to inform a small late painting by Bannister titled The Mill in Knightsville (fig. 14), depicting a factory belching smoke into the sky over a waterway in a suburban industrial area. Located west of downtown Providence, the Knightsville neighborhood and surrounding communities were home to numerous mills that made textiles, metals, chemicals, and other products during the nineteenth century. Art historian Anna Arabindan-Kesson claims that Bannister’s picture specifically represents the “Knightsville Textile Mill,” which she says “had been operating in the area for about fifty years and [was] partly owned by the Sprague family” of cotton manufacturers. Arabindan-Kesson also asserts that “Bannister’s network of patrons” included the Spragues, “who commissioned at least one portrait from him and possibly others.” Arabindan-Kesson does not specify the portrait in question or provide evidence of a commission, but she does speculate that Bannister painted The Mill in Knightsville in order to address “the entangled relations of commerce and commodification that cotton’s trade shaped,” including “links between southern plantations and northern factories.” A key visual element in her interpretation is the body of water that appears in the foreground, which she identifies as a river that “connects history to the present” and “becomes a material, and metaphorical, conduit between this landscape and slavery’s legacies in the South.” Moreover, according to Arabindan-Kesson, in Bannister’s picture “the evocation of an unseen past in an idyllic present seems to take place without the presence of a Black body.”36 Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021), 64, 66. In asserting a connection between the artist and the Sprague family, Arabindan-Kesson seems to be relying on Jennings, Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828–1901, 13, who refers in passing to “Bannister’s work for the Sprague family.” Jennings, for her part, infers evidence of this patronage from the existence of two pictures by Bannister, Governor Sprague’s White Horse (1869) and The Woodsman (1885), which allude to famous historical incidents relating to the prominent Rhode Island family. Such allusions required no patronage, however, and were matters of public knowledge that provided the artist with usable themes. On The Mill in Knightsville and cotton, see also Corinne Jennings, “Introduction,” in Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828–1901, 13.

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Description: The Mill in Knightsville by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 14. Edward Mitchell Bannister, The Mill in Knightsville, 1896. Oil on canvas, 10 × 12 1/2 in. (25.4 × 31.75 cm). Collection of Charles Coelho

Yet what of Bannister’s own body, painting en plein air at the site as he developed this very picture? Looking at the racially unspecific human figure in the foreground holding a paddle next to a small single-masted sloop, I cannot help but think of the artist himself and his personal floating studio, the Fanchon, even though the latter was a two-masted yawl. Bannister may not have intended this figure to be a self-portrait, but it resembles similar outdoor travelers in his other works, all of which recall his corporeal presence, perambulations, and artistic practice in the open air.

In my historical research, I have not found information about an industrial facility called the Knightsville Textile Mill, but various nineteenth-century sources—including a Rhode Island atlas from 1870—do confirm the existence of the Cranston Print Works, occupying a large area immediately adjacent to Knightsville (fig. 15). Founded in 1807 by William Sprague (1799–1856) as the Sprague Print Works and later renamed Cranston Print Works (after the town in which it actually resides), the facility produced printed cotton textiles for six decades until the company went out of business during the post–Civil War economic recession known as the Panic of 1873. In 1875, the Sprague family sold the operation to Robert Knight (1826–1912) and his brother, Benjamin Brayton Knight (1813–1898), whose new firm, B. B. & R. Knight, revived production there and developed one of the largest textile companies in the world, which became famous during the late nineteenth century for producing cotton products under the brand Fruit of the Loom. (Knightsville took its name not from these industrialists but from an early nineteenth-century innkeeper and U.S. congressman named Nehemiah Knight [1746–1808]). An aerial photograph of the massive Cranston Print Works in the 1930s shows two large chimneys resembling those depicted by Bannister (fig. 16). One of these chimneys, seen at the upper left (or northwest) periphery of the complex, overlooks an artificial reservoir known as the Print Works Pond, created by damming the Pocasset River and providing water for the mill’s industrial operations. The presence of leisure boats on the pond suggests that this might have been the setting for Bannister’s picture.37 On the history of Sprague Print Works, also known as Cranston Print Works, and its acquisition by the Knight family, see Patrick T. Conley, The Makers of Modern Rhode Island (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2012), Richard M. Bayles, ed., History of Providence County, Rhode Island, vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Preston, 1891), 754; Cranston Print Works Company, “Our History,” http://cpw.com; and William H. Jordy, “Cranston Print Works Village,” in SAH Archipedia (Chicago: Society of Architectural Historians, 2022), https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/RI-01-CR3. The company closed in 2009; see Bob Oakes, “Closing of Textile Plant Marks Passing of Already-Bygone Era,” WBUR.org, May 28, 2009, https://www.wbur.org/news/2009/05/28/factory-shutdown. For evidence of a legal dispute over water use relating to the Print Works Pond, see Dyer v. Cranston Print Works, Supreme Court of Rhode Island, Providence, March 20, 1901, 22 R.I. 506 (R.I. 1901).

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Description: Maps of Pawtuxet, Cranston Print Works, and Knightsville

Fig. 15. Maps of Pawtuxet, Cranston Print Works, and Knightsville. From Atlas of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Philadelphia: D. G. Beers & Co., 1870), p. 17

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Description: Cranston Print Works, Cranston by Lord, Avery

Fig. 16. Avery Lord, Cranston Print Works, Cranston, 1930s. Photograph, 18 7/8 × 14 7/8 in. (40 × 37.8 cm.). Providence Public Library

Exactly what led Bannister to paint The Mill in Knightsville and why the title of his picture refers to Knightsville instead of Cranston remains unclear. Given what we know of the artist’s commitment to social justice and racial equality, Arabindan-Kesson’s speculation that the work addresses “history just under the surface” seems plausible. However, her assertion that the picture imagines a “harmonious relationship between industry and nature” feels less compelling when we consider the composition and historical context more fully. At first glance, Bannister’s picture might seem to exemplify what cultural historian Leo Marx (1919–2022) famously described as the prevailing nineteenth-century mode of conciliatory “middle landscape” with “machine in the garden,” in this case with industrial smokestacks echoing and complementing the vertical forms of the sailboat mast and paddle in the foreground, and the American flag flying leftward atop the boat’s mast mirroring the leftward flow of smoke out of the industrial chimney behind. Yet in Bannister’s composition, these formal juxtapositions appear to be asymmetrical rather than benignly equal, for the factory looms over the foreground scene, almost dwarfing the pastoral elements. Indeed, this top-down composition hints at the artist’s misgivings about the environmental relationship in question, just as he must have understood the historical implications of American cotton and slavery to be problematic and ongoing. If the mill embodied a troubling “history just under the surface,” as Arabindan-Kesson says, it seems unlikely that he would have been indifferent to the factory’s substantial physical footprint in the present.38 Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold, 66. On the middle landscape, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 23, 56, 71, 87, 105, 113–14, 121–22, 128, 138–39, 150, 159–60, 220–26, 228, 256, 277, 282, 364–65.

Another sign of Bannister’s misgivings about industry appears in the sulfurous yellow tones in areas of the sky. The color is subtle and rhymes with the fading glow of sunset, but it gestures to timely concerns about industrial pollution, a topic widely reported in the Rhode Island press. News articles about the “smoke nuisance” and “manufacturers’ waste” tainting both air and water appeared regularly in the Providence Journal during the 1890s. As one article explained in 1894, “Scarcely any one who has been observant can have failed to note that there is now a very great deal more smoke issuing from the chimneys of mills and factories in and around Providence than used to be the case. . . . [The] increase of smoke has been referred to as an evil, grown to such an extent that steps ought to be taken to remedy it.” Toxic conditions inside the mills became a problem during these years as well. For example, according to one newspaper report headlined “Labor Troubles at Cranston, R.I.,” factory laborers in “the bleachery at Cranston Print Works” went out on strike in 1887 after being exposed to “fumes of chloride of lime and sulphuric acid, which they could not endure.”39 “Soft Coal,” Providence Journal, July 8, 1894, 14. For other references to air and water pollution in the Providence Journal, see, e.g., “Manufacturers’ Wastes,” September 6, 1896, 10; “Manufacturers’ Waste: The Question of River Pollution Nearing a Solution at Last,” December 27, 1896, 1; “Industries,” May 16, 1898, 10; “Industries,” August 2, 1898, 4; “Public Hearing: Smoke Nuisance,” March 11, 1902, 7; and “Mitigating the Smoke Nuisance,” February 2, 1908, 3. On the history of pollution in Rhode Island, including discussion of early twentieth-century legislation to counteract it, see Frank Carini, “Rhode Island’s Pollution Problems Long in the Making,” ecoRI, December 18, 2010, https://ecori.org/2010-12-18-ris-pollution-problems-long-in-the-making-html/; Arthur C. Stern, “History of Air Pollution Legislation in the United States,” Journal of the Air Pollution Control Association 32, no. 1 (1982): 47; Frederick S. Mallette, “Legislation on Air Pollution,” Public Health Reports 71, no. 11 (1956): 1069; Walter J. Shea and Edward Wright, “Progress in Controlling Pollution of Rhode Island Waters,” Sewage Works Journal 9, no. 3 (1937): 493–502; and “Labor Troubles at Cranston, R.I.,” Boston Evening Journal, May 19, 1887, 1.

Subtly but perceptibly, Bannister’s Mill in Knightsville alluded to such conditions. In so doing, the work engaged a defining dilemma of modernity concerning the environmental impacts of industry—a dilemma that American artists had grappled with for much of the nineteenth century. In his writings, Banner never mentioned “pollution,” but as we have seen, he did articulate his opposition to “low atmosphere” and “sordid gain” while celebrating the “the great three leaved book nature—of land, and sky, and water.” Racial segregation and disproportionately poor environmental conditions in communities of color surely compounded this modern dilemma for Bannister, especially in light of increasing public warnings about pollution in urban areas such as East Providence, where one of the largest African American populations in Rhode Island resided—not far from his own College Hill neighborhood. As the Providence Journal reported in 1895, “The talk that is and has been going on in East Providence about water and the pollution of Ten Mile river is causing some uneasiness in this quarter,” such that some residents “are up in arms about it.” The headline of another article that year referred to “Typhoid in East Providence.” As an experienced abolitionist, Bannister certainly understood the history of slavery, but The Mill in Knightsville suggests his awareness of present environmental conditions and related inequities as well.40 “Water and Street Lights,” Providence Journal, November 15, 1895, 3; “Typhoid in East Providence,” Providence Journal, December 10, 1895, 1. On the dilemma between economic development and nature conservation, see Alan C. Braddock and Karl Kusserow, “Introduction,” in Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018), 12–39; and Angela L. Miller, “The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation,’” in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 85–109. Regarding racial segregation in Rhode Island industrial labor, including textile mills, see Stokes and Stokes, Matter of Truth, 43. On the Bannister residence at 93 Benevolent Street in Providence, see “Bannister House,” in Guide to Providence Architecture (Providence, R.I.: Providence Preservation Society, 2022), https://guide.ppsri.org/property/bannister-house.

An even starker vision of modern factory pollution appears in one of Bannister’s previously unpublished sketches from a collection of his personal papers at the Archives of American Art, showing an unidentified urban industrial landscape with dark, ominous smokestack and thick air pollution but no mitigating river or trees (fig. 17). Here, with greater frankness than The Mill in Knightsville, Bannister revealed his realist inclinations—his willingness to confront what Stetson had called “the real, every day, toiling world.” Viewing this scene, the artist must have struggled to discern a reassuring ideal or underlying spiritual harmony of the sort espoused by transcendentalists. Bannister’s drawing offers only angular forms, negative spaces, and harshly scrawled lines filling a built environment with murky sky marred by plumes of smoke from chimneys. For some of Bannister’s contemporaries such imagery still connoted “progress,” but his vision looks decidedly critical.41 For a survey of American industrial imagery revealing various perspectives, see Rina Youngner, Industry in Art: Pittsburgh, 1812 to 1920 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

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Description: Untitled (Urban Factory with Smokestack) by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 17. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Untitled (Urban factory with smokestack), 1890s? Graphite on paper. Bannister Scrapbook, Box 1, Folder 45 of 53, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

DEPICTING BLACK BODIES IN THE OPEN AIR

A rather different vision of industry appears in Bannister’s Hay Gatherers of around 1893 (fig. 18), representing African American farm laborers, presumably somewhere in rural Rhode Island. The painting is unusual as one of the artist’s few works representing people of color, but it otherwise adheres to familiar Barbizon aesthetic conventions in its pastoral subject matter, rural setting, deep perspective, brushy technique, muted color scheme, and compositional juxtaposition of forest and agricultural fields. While some of the depicted figures appear to be busy in the distant background gathering a large mound of hay on a horse-drawn cart, other laborers walk leisurely through the grass at right, seemingly occupied only in casual conversation. No overseer intrudes upon the scene.

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Description: The Hay Gatherers by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 18. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Hay Gatherers, ca. 1893. Oil on canvas, 17 1/8 × 23 in. (43.5 × 58.4 cm). Collection of Nicholas P. Bruno, M.D.

Not unlike Arabindan-Kesson, art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw argues that Bannister’s work recalls the history of slavery. Rhode Island plantation owners and maritime merchants had participated actively in the slave economy from the early years of European colonization. As part of the notorious transatlantic triangle of trade, New England entrepreneurs sold Indigenous people and later foodstuffs to British dealers in the Caribbean in exchange for Black labor and sugar. By some estimates, Rhode Island in particular controlled between 60 and 90 percent of the transatlantic slave trade and had the largest enslaved population in the region.42 Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister,” in Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919, ed. Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 59–73. On the history of slavery and Rhode Island, see Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: NYU Press, 2018); and Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright, 2017).

According to Shaw, Bannister’s Hay Gatherers is “a space in which the artist could explore a legacy of racial oppression within a contemporary international artistic language of landscape and noble peasantry.” Though she acknowledges the painting’s ambiguous mingling of labor and leisure, Shaw interprets the scene as a discreetly concealed biblical-historical allegory of African American passage from bondage to freedom. As she observes, noting the women at right peacefully strolling through the grass toward the right foreground, “[Bannister] renders a world in which crossing over, the action of moving from one reality to another, from labor to leisure, can be achieved by fording a river of grass as though it were the River Jordan.” In Shaw’s view, “He shows these Black bodies as analogous to the Israelites, who wandered in the wilderness for forty years waiting for the ultimate reward of the Promised Land, yet still within the control of the plantation system that had enslaved their ancestors, still within Pharaoh’s reach.” Once again, history ostensibly resides just under the surface of Bannister’s work.43 Shaw, “Landscapes of Labor,” 59, 61. Shaw’s interpretation recalls a similar allegorical reading by the art historian David Lubin focused on the work of Robert S. Duncanson, whose landscape paintings often staged dramas about crossing bodies of water. See David Lubin, “Reconstructing Duncanson,” in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 107–57.

Although Bannister obviously understood the legacy of slavery and post-Reconstruction Black labor, this particular interpretation feels unsatisfying because it turns him into something he was not: a painter of religious and historical allegory. Only on rare occasions did Bannister use religious or historical themes, and never in the genre of landscape. As an artist overwhelmingly committed to landscape painting in the Barbizon mode since his move to Rhode Island, he preferred to work from direct observation of actual phenomena witnessed outdoors in the open air. He certainly responded to such phenomena creatively with a spiritual sensibility and a belief in art as a “moral power,” but the conventions of allegory were the métier of other artists. As Stetson observed, Bannister’s “genius” was not “the pastoral of the romanticists and sentimentalists” but rather that of “the real, every day, toiling world.”44 Rare examples of religious and historical work by Bannister—all genre scenes—include the following: Governor Sprague’s White Horse (1869, Rhode Island Historical Society), St. Luke (1869–73, Smithsonian American Art Museum), Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist (1890, Smithsonian American Art Museum), and Leucothea Rescuing Ulysses (1891, Newport Hospital).

A simpler, more likely explanation is that when Bannister saw real Black farmworkers in that “toiling world,” he decided to bear witness and honor them through his own artistic labor. After all, their rural activities in the open air probably reminded him in some ways of his own childhood on a farm in New Brunswick. Those personal memories, coupled with recollections of abolitionist activism, perhaps inspired Bannister to imagine Hay Gatherers as an ideal vision of free Black self-determination, in which all the workers—at labor or leisure—could fashion lives for themselves, cognizant of yet not confined by the burden of history. In other words, here in the open air of rural Rhode Island, outside the polluted city, the artist leveraged his past to envision “an idea of perfect harmony” for the future—one capable of “lifting us out of the low atmosphere of sordid gain.” For all we know, the scene may represent a Black-owned farm. In a published lecture from 1907, W. E. B. DuBois estimated that Black farmers owned three million acres of land in 1875, eight million in 1890, and twelve million in 1900, before a dramatic decline of such ownership ensued in the twentieth century.45 Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Negro in the South: William Levi Bull Lectures, 1907, by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois (New York: Herbert, 1970), cited in Bruce J. Reynolds, “Black Farmers in America, 1865–2000: The Pursuit of Independent Farming and the Role of Cooperatives,” United States Department of Agriculture, Rural Business-Cooperative Service, RBS Research Report 194 (Washington, D.C.: USDA, October 2002; reprinted October 2003), 4.

Around the time he painted Hay Gatherers, Bannister produced a seaside landscape titled Fort Dumpling, Jamestown, Rhode Island, showing tourists at a popular leisure destination on Conanicut Island, two miles west of Newport (fig. 19). As visitors relax, converse, and stroll about in the open air at midday with sailboats drifting by on Narragansett Bay, the decaying fortress, built by the fledgling U.S. military in 1798–1800 for coastal defense, looms in the background. Bannister’s decision to paint this subject was in many ways quite conventional, since the picturesque qualities of the site had been recognized by artists and journalists for years. In addition to being featured in a full-page illustration by F. O. C. Darley in Picturesque America (1872), edited by William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), Fort Dumpling and its scenic environs had provided artistic subject matter for numerous eminent landscape painters since the middle of the century, including William Guy Wall (1792–1864), George Lafayette Clough (1824–1901), John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872), Emily O. Kimball (1827–1902), John LaFarge (1835–1910), Edward Moran, and William Trost Richards (1833–1905) (fig. 20). Writing in Picturesque America, T. M. Clarke noted the garrison’s minor historical importance during the American Revolution but said that “the fort has been left for many years to the corroding wear and tear of the elements.” Nevertheless, he observed, “as a picturesque ruin, it has its charms, and has become a favorite place of resort for pleasure-parties, who cook their fish and bake their clams on the spot that once resounded to the thunder of artillery.” Similarly, Moses Sweetser described Fort Dumpling in New England: A Handbook for Travellers (1888) as “a picturesque ruin nearly a century old,” affording “beautiful views . . . from the adjacent rounded and rocky hills, over the sea and across to Newport.” In 1898, the U.S. military demolished the old fort and replaced it with a new installation called Fort Wetherill. Even so, Fort Dumpling enjoyed an afterlife of sorts well into the twentieth century in photographic postcards (fig. 21), which recycled well-established picturesque tropes such as the leisure schooner sailing by in the distance—a set piece of nineteenth-century iconography, including Bannister’s painting.46 T. M. Clarke, “Newport,” in Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In. A Delineation by Pen and Pencil, ed. William Cullen Bryant, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1872), 364; Moses F. Sweetser, New England: A Handbook for Travellers (Boston: A. Ticknor, 1888), 65b. See the following links for paintings by other artists of the subject: George L. Clough, Fort Dumpling, Rhode Island, ca. 1870, Brooklyn Museum, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/1886; John Frederick Kensett, Fort Dumpling, Jamestown, n.d., Newport Historical Society, http://newportalri.org/items/show/13604 and Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Conn.; Emily O. Kimball, Fort Dumpling, near Newport, R.I., ca. 1875 (location unknown), https://www.emilyokimball.org/fort-dumpling-ri/; Edward Moran, Old Fort Dumpling, Newport, n.d. (location unknown), https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Old-Fort-Dumpling--Newport/23879149762C4416; William Trost Richards, Fort Dumpling, Narragansett Bay, ca. 1885, Yale University Art Gallery, https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/52719; William Guy Wall, Fort Dumpling, Narragansett Bay, n.d., Private collection, https://www.skinnerinc.com/auctions/2249/lots/391. On the demolition of Fort Dumpling, in 1898, see James C. Buttrick, Jamestown (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2003), 125. For a postcard of Fort Dumpling, see Rhode Island News Company, “Old Fort Dumplin, Jamestown, R.I.” (1910), Providence Public Library, PC7065, https://provlibdigital.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A23308. Additional Fort Dumpling postcards can be found at the Providence Public Library and the Jamestown Historical Society. See, e.g., Sue Maden, Greetings from Jamestown, Rhode Island: Picture Post Card Views, 1900–1950 (Jamestown, R.I.: West Ferry Press, 1988), 72.

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Description: Fort Dumpling, Jamestown, Rhode Island by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 19. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Fort Dumpling, Jamestown, Rhode Island, ca. 1893. Oil on canvas, 10 × 12 1/2 in. (25.4 × 31.75 cm). Private Collection

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Description: Old Fort Dumpling by Darley, Felix Octavius Carr

Fig. 20. F. O. C. Darley, “Old Fort Dumpling,” engraved illustration in Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In. A Delineation by Pen and Pencil (New York: D. Appleton, 1872), ed. William Cullen Bryant, 1: 364

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Description: Old Fort Dumplin, Jamestown, R. I. by Rhode Island News Company

Fig. 21. The Rhode Island News Company, Old Fort Dumplin, Jamestown, R. I., 1910. Postcard, 5 1/2 × 3 1/2 in. (13.9 × 8.9 cm.). Providence Public Library

For Shaw, here again Bannister deliberately evoked Rhode Island’s violent colonial past. Referring to Fort Dumpling, Shaw contends, “As a military installation on Nar[r]agansett Bay, it references both the forceful conquest of Co[n]anicut Island from the Wampanoag and Nar[r]agansett peoples, Christiana Carteaux’s ancestors, and Rhode Island’s establishment as a slaveholding state and a leader in the triangular, transatlantic slave trade.” Continuing this line of interpretation, Shaw highlights an apparent disconnect between that violent history of conquest and the current “scene of leisure” by noting that “four figural groups, made up of light-skinned men, women, and children, relax along the seashore.” For Shaw, in other words, Bannister here represented an exclusively White “scene of leisure” as the outcome and beneficiary of Rhode Island colonial conquest.47 Shaw, “Landscapes of Labor,” 66, 67. For more evidence of Fort Dumpling as a tourist destination, see, e.g., Clarence Stanhope, In and around Newport (Providence, R.I.: Ryder and Dearth, 1891), 96, and numerous advertisements for ocean “Excursions” to “Old Fort Dumpling” in the Providence Journal, June 30–July 5, 1893.

Shaw’s interpretation might be more convincing if the visual evidence supported such assertions. A closer look clearly reveals that the painting depicts at least three Black people, including one of the four figures gathered together in the foreground at right and two women with parasols—one seated and one standing, both in profile—prominently placed by the artist at the center of the canvas and engaged in conversation with a White man (fig. 22). The racial identities of several other figures pictured in silhouette at the distant periphery of the scene are anyone’s guess. Whoever they are, this is hardly a homogeneous gathering of seaside vacationers, unless we simply classify them all (along with the artist-observer) as American tourists, whose leisurely enjoyment of the site presupposed the colonial conquest described by Shaw. Her argument inadvertently raises another vexing dilemma resulting from European settler colonialism—that it entailed not only a historic conflict between Indigenous people and White colonizers but also various encounters between Indigenous people and other people of color, whose presence has ineluctably shaped American history as a legacy of enslavement. As the African American spouse of an Afro-Narragansett woman whose Indigenous tribal identity and lands were still under attack by the State of Rhode Island, Bannister certainly understood his own implication in this complex history, but the mood of his picture—not unlike that of Hay Gatherers—seems far more upbeat than Shaw’s interpretation suggests. For one thing, in both works, Bannister obviously and unequivocally chose to represent Black bodies freely inhabiting open space. In the case of Fort Dumpling, he showed Blacks and Whites mingling peacefully, thereby affirming the rights enshrined in Rhode Island’s General Law Chapter 508 of 1885, passed eight years before. The artist probably knew about and perhaps even used a ferry service established between Newport and Fort Dumpling in 1888 aboard the steamer Dumpling, whose passengers included people of color, according to contemporary newspapers. Bannister may well have observed a scene of diversity and inclusion like the one he depicted in Fort Dumpling. In any case, his vision of social harmony in the open air remained true to his progressive politics and to his Barbizon methods, which presupposed his corporeal presence and rightful claim to public space. As thematic and practical examples of Black landscape, both Hay Gatherers and Fort Dumpling offer early expressions of environmental justice.48 On the ferry service between Newport and Fort Dumpling aboard the steamer Dumpling, beginning in 1888, see William R. Ross, “Preserving Jamestown, Rhode Island: The How and Why of Safeguarding an Island’s Historic Resources” (M.S. thesis, Columbia University, 2016), 15. For articles in the Newport Journal and Newport Daily News referring to this ferry service as being operated by the Dumpling Steamboat Company, see Sue Maden, ed., Jamestown News Items, 1873–1899 (Jamestown, R.I.: Jamestown Historical Society and Jamestown Press, 1995), 121, 123, 127–28, 145, 151, 162, 220; page 123 reproduces a clipping with the headline “Jamestown” from the Newport Journal, August 11, 1888, describing a dance concert by “the colored glee club” held at the Jamestown Town Hall and how “The Dumpling, after midnight last night, took a party to Newport who had been in attendance at the dance.” If Bannister had sold his yawl, Fanchon, by this time, he could have visited Fort Dumpling by ferry, even though it was surrounded by private properties.

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Description: Fort Dumpling, Jamestown, Rhode Island, detail by Bannister, Edward Mitchell

Fig. 22. Edward Mitchell Bannister, Fort Dumpling, Jamestown, Rhode Island, ca. 1893 (detail). Oil on canvas, 10 × 12 1/2 in. (25.4 × 31.75 cm). Private Collection

I conclude this chapter by revisiting the fascinating photograph by Jonas Bergner showing Bannister at work, painting a historic Union warship at Battery Park on the seaside of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1887 (see fig. 3). Little is known about Bergner, an immigrant photographer from Sweden, but sketching trips by Bannister like the one shown here were evidently a matter of public note in the African American press, judging from an article published that year in the New York Freeman, which observed, “The Summer is the time to prepare work for Winter, so Mr. E. M. Bannister has gone to Newport on a sketching tour, combined with pleasure.” Historically speaking, the photograph of Bannister at Battery Park registers his artistic interest in a naval vessel that had enforced Union blockades during the Civil War by attacking Confederate raiding and smuggling ships. His interest was likely more than historical, however, for the U.S.S. Richmond also featured prominently in a mock naval wargame carried out in Newport harbor on November 10, 1887, creating a public spectacle that attracted considerable attention and admiration. During the proceedings, the Richmond led a squadron of five U.S. warships—all renovated with modern steam engines—as they sailed in formation past Fort Adams (located at the south end of Newport harbor), firing guns in what one local journalist called a “sham battle which has been a leading subject of conversation in all circles for the past several weeks.” According to this writer, “The first shot was fired from the flagship Richmond but it was quickly answered from the fort and a rapid interchange of shots followed in a most exciting manner.” Even the national press took note. Describing the “Naval Drill at Newport” in Harper’s Weekly as involving “noisy with guns that barked but did not bite,” J. D. J. Kelley said, “Circumstances, of course, made the struggle mainly spectacular, but even here the unities were preserved with a fine appreciation of their picturesque possibilities.” No wonder Bannister set up his easel at Battery Park to observe and paint the Richmond, which appears in Bergner’s photograph anchored just offshore (presumably after the drill’s conclusion) but also on the painter’s canvas as a work-in-progress—a picture that has not been located. As I have already suggested in relation to his other works, Bannister’s interest here encompassed both historical and contemporary realities. Accordingly, the photograph of him outdoors in the open, occupying public space at Newport during the Jim Crow era, could be said to mirror his art—and his words—by asserting the Black body’s legitimacy as one of the “material facts of nature.”49 “Rhode Island Doings,” New York Freeman, August 20, 1887, 4. “Thursday’s Sham Battle,” Newport Mercury, November 12, 1887; J. D. J. Kelley, “Naval Drill at Newport,” Harper’s Weekly, November 26, 1887, 855. For more on the naval drill, see Virginia Covell, “The U.S.S. Richmond,” Green Light: Bulletin of the Point Association of Newport, Rhode Island 33, no. 1 (1988): 11; and John R. Wadleigh, “Newport’s Navy Army Game, 1887,” Newport History: Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society 60, no. 3 (1987): 127–34.

As the historian Myra B. Young Armstead observes in a study of race and travel in America circa 1900, “Black tourists at mainstream vacation spots implicitly defied prevailing expectations for tourist spaces during an era of officially sanctioned racial segregation. Black bodies,” Armstead says, “enjoying popular tourist destinations inherently reflected the black belief that African Americans, as consumers, were entitled to occupy such places despite white hostility. Moreover, . . . by documenting their own tourist experiences and holiday venues . . . African Americans created visual texts that asserted their respectability and rightful place within the ranks of ‘good’ society.” Armstead’s study, which illustrates this photograph of Bannister, thus operates on two levels relative to the painter’s achievement, for it not only documents his presence at Newport but also shows him generating his own “visual text” asserting his “respectability” and “rightful place” in an environment where many White Americans at the time did not welcome him. On the other hand, by showing Bannister peacefully accompanied by other people, including an African American child and two unidentified White youths, the photograph also registered a degree of acceptance regarding his presence in public space—not unlike the vision of diversity in Fort Dumpling and consistent with the letter of Rhode Island law.50 Myra B. Young Armstead, “Revisiting Hotels and Other Lodgings: American Tourist Spaces through the Lens of Black Pleasure-Travelers, 1880–1950,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 25 (2005): 136–59; quotes on 137. In her subsequent book, “Lord Please Don’t Take Me in August”: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870–1930 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), Armstead illustrates a print of Bergner’s photograph from the collection of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society with a caption referring to the artist as “unidentified,” whereas her earlier article identifies him as Bannister. Another print of the same photograph—which I viewed at the Newport Historical Society—carries an inscription on the verso by local historian and collector Wilfrid E. Warren (1917–1991) saying, “A Bergner photograph taken c1887 at Battery Park–Newport, R.I. The colored artist is Mr. Bannister.” Although staff at the Newport Historical Society were not able to locate an original negative or other information about this particular photograph by Bergner (a Swedish immigrant represented by seventy-nine works in the society’s collection spanning the late 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century), they described Warren as a knowledgeable authority on Newport history. I see no reason to question the accuracy of the inscription, which specifically identifies Bannister as the artist. I am grateful to Bertram Lippincott III and Kaela Bleho for showing me the photograph at the Newport Historical Society and for sharing their expertise about local history.

In various ways and in numerous works of art, Bannister modeled an early vision of environmental justice—one that merits ecocritical consideration. By embracing Barbizon-style techniques of plein air painting, he palpably affirmed his presence outdoors as a direct observer of the spaces around him, including scenes of rural farm labor, seaside leisure, and even urban industry. Further, by espousing a complex combination of progressive politics, transcendentalist spirituality, and modern realism, he invited us to understand his work as a reflection on history and a vision of a harmonious future. In various ways, Bannister boldly asserted his bodily presence as material fact and moral imperative, exemplifying his stated belief that the artist “becomes the interpreter of the infinite, subtle qualities of the spiritual idea centering in all created things.”

Epigraph: “justice, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/102198.

1 Robert D. Bullard, ed., The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2005), 19–20, 38–42; quotation on page 19. See also Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990). For general background, see Esme G. Murdock, “A History of Environmental Justice: Foundations, Narratives, and Perspectives,” in Environmental Justice: Key Issues, ed. Brendan Coolsaet, with a foreword by Robert D. Bullard (New York: Routledge, 2021), 7–8. On the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ban of PCB production, see “EPA Bans PCB Manufacture; Phases Out Uses,” press release, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, April 19, 1979. On PCBs classified as carcinogenic, see Béatrice Lauby-Secretan et al., “Carcinogenicity of Polychlorinated Biphenyls Polybrominated Biphenyls,” Lancet Oncology, April 14, 2013, 287–88. On the Minamata case, see S. Timothy George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). »

2 Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: Commission for Racial Justice, United Church of Christ, 1987), ix. Early uses of the term include Joseph A. Page and Gary B. Sellers, “Occupational Safety and Health: Environmental Justice for the Forgotten American,” Kentucky Law Journal 59, no. 1 (1970): 114–45; Richard G. Bond, “Salvationists, Utilitarians, and Environmental Justice,” Ramapo Papers 1, no. 2 (1976): 1–38; Eileen Cooper, “Protest over Toxic Waste Site,” New York Times, February 8, 1981 (referring to PCBs and “environmental justice” at Beacon Falls, Conn.); Devajyoti Deka, “Social and Environmental Justice Issues in Urban Transportation,” in The Geography of Urban Transportation, ed. Susan Hanson (New York: Guilford, 1986); and Peter S. Wenz, Environmental Justice (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). For an encyclopedia entry, see Robert M. Figueroa, “Environmental Justice,” in Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: A Global Resource, ed. J. Britt Holbrook (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Cengage, 2015), 129–36. »

3 “Principles of Environmental Justice,” in Adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, Washington, DC, October 1991 (New York: United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1991), reprinted in Sharing the Earth: An International Environmental Justice Reader, ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Modhumita Roy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 279–80. »

4 For a recent study connecting such issues, see Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021). »

5 On Regan and the current official definition of environmental justice, see “Environmental Justice,” www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice, last updated September 30, 2022. For the United Nations initiatives, see “Social and Environmental Justice for All,” September 23, 2020, https://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/2020/09/international-day-for-the-eradication-of-poverty-17-october-2020/; and “Five Steps to Environmental Justice,” June 23, 2022, https://www.undp.org/blog/five-steps-environmental-justice. »

6 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 74–76. »

7 Regarding protests in Richmond, Virginia, on Monument Avenue in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, see Jessica Stewart, “Powerful BLM Video Projections Help Reclaim Controversial Robert E. Lee Monument” [interview with artist Dustin Klein], My Modern Met, July 28, 2020; and Lydia Murray, “Meet Ava Holloway and Kennedy George, the Teens Whose Photo Dancing on a Confederate Statue Went Viral,” Dance Magazine, July 30, 2020. »

8 On the Confederate memorials of Monument Avenue as part of a Jim Crow–era segregationist real estate venture with material consequences, see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 129–61; and Kevin M. Levin, “Richmond’s Confederate Monuments Were Used to Sell a Segregated Neighborhood,” Atlantic, June 11, 2020. For an example of the racist real estate advertisement, see Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 17, 1913, 11. »

9 Linda Villarosa, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation (New York: Doubleday, 2022), 83–84; George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 10–23. See also D. Phoung Do, Lindsay R. B. Locklar, and Paul Florsheim, “Triple Jeopardy: The Joint Impact of Racial Segregation and Neighborhood Poverty on the Mental Health of Black Americans,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 54 (2019): 533–41; and Elyes Hanafi, “Spatial Imagination Not for All: The Case of African Americans,” Journal of Psychohistory 45, no. 4 (2018): 267–88. A study that interprets Confederate monuments as merely symbolic and inconsequential is Todd Cronan and Charles Palermo, “Take It Down! Symbolic Politics Is Just That,” Common Dreams, July 2020. For the broader context of spatial politics and the consequences of racial exclusion, see Richard H. Schein, ed., Landscape and Race in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2006). »

10 For general discussion of the artists’ careers, see Lisa Farrington, African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 83–91; and Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 19–53. On Duncanson, see also Joseph D. Ketner, Robert S. Duncanson: Emergence of the African American Artist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993); and David Lubin, “Reconstructing Duncanson,” in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 107–57. Regarding Bannister, see Naurice Frank Woods, Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Art: The Ascendancy of Robert Duncanson, Edward Bannister, and Edmonia Lewis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021), 75–123; and Juanita Marie Holland, “Reaching through the Veil: African-American Artist Edward Mitchell Bannister,” in Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828–1901 (New York: Kenkeleba House, 1992), 17–66. For a comprehensive monograph on Brown, see Robert Chandler, San Francisco Lithographer: African American Artist Grafton Tyler Brown (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). »

11 For the Bergner photograph, see Newport Historical Society Collections Online, Object number P39, https://collections.newporthistory.org/Detail/objects/2639. On German idealism and transcendentalism in relation to this artist, see Traci Costa, “Edward Mitchell Bannister and the Aesthetics of Idealism,” in Locating American Art: Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums, Colonial to Present, ed. Cynthia Fowler (New York: Routledge, 2016), 89–108. »

12 For biographical information on Bannister, see Bearden and Henderson, History of African American Artists, 40–51; and Holland, “Reaching through the Veil,” 17–57. On Hatch, see his biographical entry in Council of Archives New Brunswick, https://search.canbarchives.ca/harris-hatch. On Christiana Carteaux, see Jane Lancaster, “‘I Would Have Made Out Very Poorly Had It Not Been for Her’: The Life and Work of Christiana Bannister, Hair Doctress and Philanthropist,” Rhode Island History 59, no. 4 (2001): 102–21. For a reproduction of Bannister’s portrait of his wife, now in the RISD Museum, see https://risdmuseum.org/art-design/collection/portrait-christiana-carteaux-bannister-2016381. »

13 For references to Bannister taking part in various antislavery events, see Liberator (Boston), February 26, 1858, 35; March 5, 1858, 39; August 19, 1859, 132; December 26, 1862, 207; December 15, 1863, 207; and “The Seventeenth June,” Boston Post, June 19, 1865. On Bannister’s donation of the Shaw portrait, see Liberator, October 21, 1864, 170. Additional discussion of Bannister’s activism appears in Woods, Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Art, 77–85. For detailed examination of Christiana Bannister’s activism, see Lancaster, “‘I Would Have Made Out Very Poorly.’” »

14 Holland, “Reaching through the Veil,” 18, 27, 39. A notice in the Boston Daily Advertiser, April 26, 1866, 1, for the “First Exhibition of Works of Art” at the Allston Club refers to unnamed works by Daubigny, Corot, Rousseau, and numerous other “Distinguished Artists.” For more on Hunt and the taste for Barbizon painting in Boston during this period, see Nancy Allyn Jarzombek, Boston Art Club, 1855–1950 (Boston: Vose Galleries, 2000), 4–5, 9, 66, 67, 71, 72, 81, 84; Daniel Rosenfeld and Robert G. Workman, The Spirit of Barbizon: France and America (Providence, R.I.: Rhode Island School of Design, 1986). »

15 On the move to Providence and other biographical details, see “Died in Church: Edward M. Bannister, Well-Known Colored Artist of This City, Stricken,” Providence Journal, January 11, 1901, 8, which identifies “heart disease” as his cause of death. See also Holland, “Reaching through the Veil,” 27. For the law of 1855, see “January Session, 1885—Chapter 508,” Public Laws of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations Passed at the Sessions of the General Assembly, from January, 1882, to May, 1885, Inclusive (Providence: Office of the Secretary of State, 1885), 257–58. »

16 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Black North: A Social Study,” New York Times, November 17, 1901; Public Archaeology Laboratory, African American Struggle for Civil Rights in Rhode Island: The Twentieth Century (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, 2019), 3–4; see pages 5–6 for the Sumner Political Club declaration in 1898. For more on the history of civil rights in Rhode Island, including the act of 1880 abolishing the Narragansett Tribe, see Keith W. Stokes and Theresa Guzmán Stokes, A Matter of Truth: The Struggle for African Heritage and Indigenous People Equal Rights in Providence, Rhode Island (1620–2020) (Middletown: Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, 2021), 61–62. See also Geralyn Ducady, “African American Civil Rights in Rhode Island,” in EnCompass: A Digital Sourcebook of Rhode Island History (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society and Providence College, 2016–22), http://library.providence.edu/encompass/african-american-civil-rights-in-rhode-island/african-american-civil-rights-in-rhode-island/. »

17 Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 44; “Died in Church”; Edward Mitchell Bannister Scrapbook, 1866–1901, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. »

18 I thank Maureen O’Brien at the RISD Museum of Art, Nancy Grinnell at the Providence Art Club, and William Vareika of William Vareika Fine Arts in Newport, R.I., for viewing and discussing works by Bannister with me during my visit to Rhode Island in December 2022. As William Vareika informed me, the growing market for Bannister paintings has fostered an unfortunate problem of forgeries and mistaken attributions in some cases. In the opinion of Vareika, a leading authority on the artist, all of the Bannister paintings mentioned in this chapter are securely attributed to the artist—an opinion corroborated by other scholars. »

19 For Bannister’s account of winning the first-place medal and interaction with the committee, see George Whitaker, “Edward M. Bannister,” typescript, Edward Mitchell Bannister Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 4–5, transcribed in Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists. “Died in Church.” Other instances of Bannister depicting singular figures in open space include the following works (all at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.): Untitled (Landscape, Boat Moored near Stream, Man Walking in Foreground), 1879; Untitled (Landscape, Woodcutter on Path), 1879; Woman Walking Down Path, 1882; Untitled (Man on Path with Trees in Background), 1882; Sunset, 1883; Fisherman by Water, 1886; Untitled (Landscape with Trees and Woman), 1894; Homeward, 1894; and Untitled (Landscape, Woman Carrying Wood), n.d. On the Fanchon, including its purchase from Bannister by a friend named George Bliss, see Holland, “Reaching through the Veil,” 45, 73, 75. I thank Bill Emerson, a descendant of Bliss, for sharing photographs and information about Fanchon, including its identification as a yawl and the likely date of 1891 for Bannister’s sale of the boat to Bliss. Scholars have never explained why Bannister called the vessel Fanchon. According to my research, “Fanchon” has been a European woman’s name for centuries. In 1804, the German romantic composer Friedrich Heinrich Himmel (1765–1814) used it as the title of an opera, or Singspiel. Later in the nineteenth century, the German American conductor and playwright Augustus Waldauer adapted a story by George Sand titled “La Petite Fadette” in writing Fanchon, the Cricket: A Domestic Drama, in Five Acts (Chicago: Dramatic, 1862), which toured widely around the United States. Perhaps a more immediate source of inspiration for Bannister, however, was Mary Mann’s novel Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1887), featuring a Black female character named Fanchon whose mother had been enslaved. As the protagonist of an eponymous chapter in the novel, Fanchon visits Cuba with a character named Madame Cazneau, who once employed her as a servant. During their stay at a local plantation, Fanchon witnesses the enduring horrors of slavery under Spanish rule. Several meticulous mechanical drawings by Bannister, evidently depicting the Fanchon, appear among the artist’s papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. »

20 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855), 42, 43. »

21 Douglass, vi, 323–24. »

22 Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828, ed. Olive Gilbert (Boston: Printed for the Author, 1850), 116. »

23 Truth, 117. »

24 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69–70. »

25 On Du Bois’s environmental awareness, see Scott Hicks, “‘A Thorough Study of Causes’: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, and Progressive Era Materiality,” in A Greene Country Town: Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 141–52. »

26 On Rousseau and A Tree in the Fontainebleau Forest, a work which apparently has never traveled to the United States, see Greg M. Thomas, Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 56–57. »

27 Alfred Sensier, Souvenirs sur Th. Rousseau (Paris: Leon Trechener, 1872), 120–21, translated in Thomas, Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France, 1. »

28 Edward Mitchell Bannister, “The Artist and His Critics,” April 15, 1886, unpublished lecture manuscript, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Mss. 262, 4–5, 24–25. »

29 Thomas, Art and Ecology, 196–98, 200; Costa, “Edward Mitchell Bannister and the Aesthetics of Idealism,” 90, 92–97, 98; George Whitaker, “Edward Mitchell Bannister,” undated newspaper clipping, Bannister Scrapbook, box 2, folder 41 of 44. »

30 Sensier, Souvenirs, 165, translated in Thomas, Art and Ecology, 105. »

31 Bannister, “Artist and His Critics,” 3; Laura L. Meixner, “Popular Criticism of Jean-François Millet in Nineteenth-Century America,” Art Bulletin 65, no. 1 (1983): 94–105. »

32 [Charles Walter Stetson], “The Art Club Exhibition. II.,” undated newspaper clipping with handwritten inscriptions, “1880” and “by Stetson,” Bannister Scrapbook, box 2, folder 44 of 44. »

33 On Stetson, see Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson, ed. Mary Armfield Hill (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985). For more information about Bannister’s role in founding the Providence Art Club, see Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 46–47. »

34 Bannister, “Artist and His Critics,” 11. »

35 Bannister, 1, 2; “sordid, adj. and n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/184862. »

36 Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021), 64, 66. In asserting a connection between the artist and the Sprague family, Arabindan-Kesson seems to be relying on Jennings, Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828–1901, 13, who refers in passing to “Bannister’s work for the Sprague family.” Jennings, for her part, infers evidence of this patronage from the existence of two pictures by Bannister, Governor Sprague’s White Horse (1869) and The Woodsman (1885), which allude to famous historical incidents relating to the prominent Rhode Island family. Such allusions required no patronage, however, and were matters of public knowledge that provided the artist with usable themes. On The Mill in Knightsville and cotton, see also Corinne Jennings, “Introduction,” in Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828–1901, 13. »

37 On the history of Sprague Print Works, also known as Cranston Print Works, and its acquisition by the Knight family, see Patrick T. Conley, The Makers of Modern Rhode Island (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2012), Richard M. Bayles, ed., History of Providence County, Rhode Island, vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Preston, 1891), 754; Cranston Print Works Company, “Our History,” http://cpw.com; and William H. Jordy, “Cranston Print Works Village,” in SAH Archipedia (Chicago: Society of Architectural Historians, 2022), https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/RI-01-CR3. The company closed in 2009; see Bob Oakes, “Closing of Textile Plant Marks Passing of Already-Bygone Era,” WBUR.org, May 28, 2009, https://www.wbur.org/news/2009/05/28/factory-shutdown. For evidence of a legal dispute over water use relating to the Print Works Pond, see Dyer v. Cranston Print Works, Supreme Court of Rhode Island, Providence, March 20, 1901, 22 R.I. 506 (R.I. 1901). »

38 Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold, 66. On the middle landscape, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 23, 56, 71, 87, 105, 113–14, 121–22, 128, 138–39, 150, 159–60, 220–26, 228, 256, 277, 282, 364–65. »

39 “Soft Coal,” Providence Journal, July 8, 1894, 14. For other references to air and water pollution in the Providence Journal, see, e.g., “Manufacturers’ Wastes,” September 6, 1896, 10; “Manufacturers’ Waste: The Question of River Pollution Nearing a Solution at Last,” December 27, 1896, 1; “Industries,” May 16, 1898, 10; “Industries,” August 2, 1898, 4; “Public Hearing: Smoke Nuisance,” March 11, 1902, 7; and “Mitigating the Smoke Nuisance,” February 2, 1908, 3. On the history of pollution in Rhode Island, including discussion of early twentieth-century legislation to counteract it, see Frank Carini, “Rhode Island’s Pollution Problems Long in the Making,” ecoRI, December 18, 2010, https://ecori.org/2010-12-18-ris-pollution-problems-long-in-the-making-html/; Arthur C. Stern, “History of Air Pollution Legislation in the United States,” Journal of the Air Pollution Control Association 32, no. 1 (1982): 47; Frederick S. Mallette, “Legislation on Air Pollution,” Public Health Reports 71, no. 11 (1956): 1069; Walter J. Shea and Edward Wright, “Progress in Controlling Pollution of Rhode Island Waters,” Sewage Works Journal 9, no. 3 (1937): 493–502; and “Labor Troubles at Cranston, R.I.,” Boston Evening Journal, May 19, 1887, 1. »

40 “Water and Street Lights,” Providence Journal, November 15, 1895, 3; “Typhoid in East Providence,” Providence Journal, December 10, 1895, 1. On the dilemma between economic development and nature conservation, see Alan C. Braddock and Karl Kusserow, “Introduction,” in Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018), 12–39; and Angela L. Miller, “The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation,’” in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 85–109. Regarding racial segregation in Rhode Island industrial labor, including textile mills, see Stokes and Stokes, Matter of Truth, 43. On the Bannister residence at 93 Benevolent Street in Providence, see “Bannister House,” in Guide to Providence Architecture (Providence, R.I.: Providence Preservation Society, 2022), https://guide.ppsri.org/property/bannister-house. »

41 For a survey of American industrial imagery revealing various perspectives, see Rina Youngner, Industry in Art: Pittsburgh, 1812 to 1920 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). »

42 Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister,” in Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919, ed. Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 59–73. On the history of slavery and Rhode Island, see Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: NYU Press, 2018); and Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright, 2017). »

43 Shaw, “Landscapes of Labor,” 59, 61. Shaw’s interpretation recalls a similar allegorical reading by the art historian David Lubin focused on the work of Robert S. Duncanson, whose landscape paintings often staged dramas about crossing bodies of water. See David Lubin, “Reconstructing Duncanson,” in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 107–57. »

44 Rare examples of religious and historical work by Bannister—all genre scenes—include the following: Governor Sprague’s White Horse (1869, Rhode Island Historical Society), St. Luke (1869–73, Smithsonian American Art Museum), Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist (1890, Smithsonian American Art Museum), and Leucothea Rescuing Ulysses (1891, Newport Hospital). »

45 Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Negro in the South: William Levi Bull Lectures, 1907, by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois (New York: Herbert, 1970), cited in Bruce J. Reynolds, “Black Farmers in America, 1865–2000: The Pursuit of Independent Farming and the Role of Cooperatives,” United States Department of Agriculture, Rural Business-Cooperative Service, RBS Research Report 194 (Washington, D.C.: USDA, October 2002; reprinted October 2003), 4. »

46 T. M. Clarke, “Newport,” in Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In. A Delineation by Pen and Pencil, ed. William Cullen Bryant, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1872), 364; Moses F. Sweetser, New England: A Handbook for Travellers (Boston: A. Ticknor, 1888), 65b. See the following links for paintings by other artists of the subject: George L. Clough, Fort Dumpling, Rhode Island, ca. 1870, Brooklyn Museum, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/1886; John Frederick Kensett, Fort Dumpling, Jamestown, n.d., Newport Historical Society, http://newportalri.org/items/show/13604 and Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Conn.; Emily O. Kimball, Fort Dumpling, near Newport, R.I., ca. 1875 (location unknown), https://www.emilyokimball.org/fort-dumpling-ri/; Edward Moran, Old Fort Dumpling, Newport, n.d. (location unknown), https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Old-Fort-Dumpling--Newport/23879149762C4416; William Trost Richards, Fort Dumpling, Narragansett Bay, ca. 1885, Yale University Art Gallery, https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/52719; William Guy Wall, Fort Dumpling, Narragansett Bay, n.d., Private collection, https://www.skinnerinc.com/auctions/2249/lots/391. On the demolition of Fort Dumpling, in 1898, see James C. Buttrick, Jamestown (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2003), 125. For a postcard of Fort Dumpling, see Rhode Island News Company, “Old Fort Dumplin, Jamestown, R.I.” (1910), Providence Public Library, PC7065, https://provlibdigital.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A23308. Additional Fort Dumpling postcards can be found at the Providence Public Library and the Jamestown Historical Society. See, e.g., Sue Maden, Greetings from Jamestown, Rhode Island: Picture Post Card Views, 1900–1950 (Jamestown, R.I.: West Ferry Press, 1988), 72. »

47 Shaw, “Landscapes of Labor,” 66, 67. For more evidence of Fort Dumpling as a tourist destination, see, e.g., Clarence Stanhope, In and around Newport (Providence, R.I.: Ryder and Dearth, 1891), 96, and numerous advertisements for ocean “Excursions” to “Old Fort Dumpling” in the Providence Journal, June 30–July 5, 1893. »

48 On the ferry service between Newport and Fort Dumpling aboard the steamer Dumpling, beginning in 1888, see William R. Ross, “Preserving Jamestown, Rhode Island: The How and Why of Safeguarding an Island’s Historic Resources” (M.S. thesis, Columbia University, 2016), 15. For articles in the Newport Journal and Newport Daily News referring to this ferry service as being operated by the Dumpling Steamboat Company, see Sue Maden, ed., Jamestown News Items, 1873–1899 (Jamestown, R.I.: Jamestown Historical Society and Jamestown Press, 1995), 121, 123, 127–28, 145, 151, 162, 220; page 123 reproduces a clipping with the headline “Jamestown” from the Newport Journal, August 11, 1888, describing a dance concert by “the colored glee club” held at the Jamestown Town Hall and how “The Dumpling, after midnight last night, took a party to Newport who had been in attendance at the dance.” If Bannister had sold his yawl, Fanchon, by this time, he could have visited Fort Dumpling by ferry, even though it was surrounded by private properties. »

49 “Rhode Island Doings,” New York Freeman, August 20, 1887, 4. “Thursday’s Sham Battle,” Newport Mercury, November 12, 1887; J. D. J. Kelley, “Naval Drill at Newport,” Harper’s Weekly, November 26, 1887, 855. For more on the naval drill, see Virginia Covell, “The U.S.S. Richmond,” Green Light: Bulletin of the Point Association of Newport, Rhode Island 33, no. 1 (1988): 11; and John R. Wadleigh, “Newport’s Navy Army Game, 1887,” Newport History: Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society 60, no. 3 (1987): 127–34. »

50 Myra B. Young Armstead, “Revisiting Hotels and Other Lodgings: American Tourist Spaces through the Lens of Black Pleasure-Travelers, 1880–1950,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 25 (2005): 136–59; quotes on 137. In her subsequent book, “Lord Please Don’t Take Me in August”: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870–1930 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), Armstead illustrates a print of Bergner’s photograph from the collection of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society with a caption referring to the artist as “unidentified,” whereas her earlier article identifies him as Bannister. Another print of the same photograph—which I viewed at the Newport Historical Society—carries an inscription on the verso by local historian and collector Wilfrid E. Warren (1917–1991) saying, “A Bergner photograph taken c1887 at Battery Park–Newport, R.I. The colored artist is Mr. Bannister.” Although staff at the Newport Historical Society were not able to locate an original negative or other information about this particular photograph by Bergner (a Swedish immigrant represented by seventy-nine works in the society’s collection spanning the late 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century), they described Warren as a knowledgeable authority on Newport history. I see no reason to question the accuracy of the inscription, which specifically identifies Bannister as the artist. I am grateful to Bertram Lippincott III and Kaela Bleho for showing me the photograph at the Newport Historical Society and for sharing their expertise about local history. »

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