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Sculpture, chains and the Armstrong gun : John Bell’s American slave
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Hatt, Michael (2016) Sculpture, chains and the Armstrong gun : John Bell’s American slave. Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, 15 (2). ISSN 1543-1002.
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WRAP-sculpture-chains-armstrong-gun-Hatt-2016.pdf - Published Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 4.0. Download (1517Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/summer...
Abstract
Discussion of The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers (1805–73) has routinely cited John Tenniel’s famous caricature The Virginian Slave (fig. 1), published in Punch in 1851 as the “fitting companion” to Powers’s statue.[1] Tenniel’s image made explicit the scandal of American slavery and accused Powers, and by extension the United States, of disavowing the reality of contemporary slavery in its imagined pairing with The Greek Slave. What has rarely been acknowledged is that a version of this fitting companion was, in fact, produced: The American Slave (fig. 2) by John Bell (1811–95). Bell’s statue, first shown as A Daughter of Eve—A Scene on the Shore of the Atlantic in plaster at the Royal Academy in 1853, represents a young woman on the shore of Africa, chained and awaiting transportation to the Americas. The title was changed for the London International Exhibition in 1862, in response to the American Civil War. The statue shares the critical politics of Punch, which regularly and forcefully attacked the institution of slavery in the United States, and was intended, like the cartoon, to remind viewers of what The Greek Slave hid from view.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Subjects: | E History America > E151 United States (General) N Fine Arts > NB Sculpture |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History of Art | ||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Bell, John, 1811-1895, Slavery in art, Slavery -- United States -- History, Sculpture | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide | ||||||
Publisher: | Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art | ||||||
ISSN: | 1543-1002 | ||||||
Editor: | Droth, Michael and Hatt, Michael | ||||||
Official Date: | 2016 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 15 | ||||||
Number: | 2 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 27 February 2019 | ||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 27 February 2019 | ||||||
Related URLs: |
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