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Falls of Minnehaha
Robert S. Duncanson (American, 1821–1872)
Title
Falls of Minnehaha
Artist
Robert S. Duncanson (American, 1821–1872)
Date
1862
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
36 3/8 × 28 1/8 in. (92.4 × 71.4 cm)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Museum purchase, gift of The Sherwood Foundation
Object Number
2023.12
On View
On view
Provenance
Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906), London, before 1906;
By descent in the family, 1906–1973;
Purchased at their sale, Selected Old & Modern Paintings, Debenham Coe, London, December 5, 1973, lot 109, by Richard Green Gallery, London, 1973–1975;
Purchased from Richard Green Gallery by Edward (born 1945) and Deborah Shein (born 1952), Seekonk, Massachusetts, 1975–1976.
Louis (1909–1985) and Lena Glaser (1911–1984), Providence, Rhode Island, 1976–1985;
By descent to their daughter, Francine Glaser Aron (1938–1994), and her husband, Edward Aron (1935–2006), Cranston, Rhode Island, 1985–1989.
Private collection, Massachusetts, 1989–c. 1993.
Private collection, New York, c. 1993–2023;
Consigned by the former to Alexandre Gallery, New York, 2023;
Purchased from Alexandre Gallery by Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2023.
Exhibition History
Two Centuries of Black American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, September 30–November 21, 1976; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, January 8–February 20, 1977; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, March 30–May 15, 1977; Brooklyn Museum, New York, June 25–August 21, 1977, no. 30.
Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth-Century America, from the Collections of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, January 15–April 7, 1985, no. 11.
Conversations: African and African American Artworks in Dialogue: From the Collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and Camille O. and William H. Cosby Jr., National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, November 9, 2014–January 24, 2016, no. 96.
Published References
Edward Radford, “Canadian Photographs,” Art Journal 3, no. 28 (April 1, 1864), 113.
Edward H. Dwight, “Robert S. Duncanson,” Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 13, no. 3 (July 1955), 209.
Romare Bearden and Harry Brinton Henderson, Six Black Masters of American Art (New York: Zenith Books, 1972), 34.
David C. Driskell, Two Centuries of Black American Art, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976), 83 (repro.), 124.
Rena N. Coen, Painting and Sculpture in Minnesota, 1820-1914 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 41, 43 (repro.).
Joseph H. Firman, “Black Art,” Pomona Progress Bulletin 92, no. 254 (October 10, 1976), 29 (repro.).
Leonard Simon, “The American Presence of the Black Artist,” American Art Review 3, no. 6 (November-December 1976), 105.
Sam Hunter, Art in Business: The Philip Morris Story (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 134 (repro.).
Freida High, African and Afro-American Art Slide Collection: A Visual Resource for the Study of Black Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1982), 106.
Lynda R. Hartigan, Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth-Century America, from the Collections of the National Museum of American Art, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 62 (repro.), 118.
William H. Gerdts, Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting, 1710-1920. Volume Three: The Far Midwest, the Rocky Mountain West, the Southwest, the Pacific (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 11.
Romare Bearden and Harry Brinton Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 31.
Joseph D. Ketner, The Emergence of the African-American Artist: Robert S. Duncanson, 1821-1872 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 114, 126 (repro.), 199.
Barbara A. Hudson, “Images Used by African-Americans to Combat Negative Stereotypes,” in Racial and Ethnic Identity: Psychological Development and Creative Expression, eds. Herbert W. Harris, Howard C. Blue, and Ezra E. H. Griffith (New York: Routledge, 1995), 137, 140 (repro.).
Judith Wilson, “The Challenges of the 19th Century: Two Recent Landmark Publications in African American Visual Production,” The International Review of African American Art 12, no. 1 (1995), 52.
David C. Driskell, The Other Side of Color: African American Art in the Collection of Camille O. and William H. Cosby, Jr. (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2001), 13, 17 (repro.).
Stephen Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, Third Edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 201.
Everlyn Nicodemus and Kristian Romare, “Robert S. Duncanson, an African American Pioneer Artist with Links to Scotland,” in Africa in Scotland, Scotland in Africa: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Hybridities, eds. Afe Adogame and Andrew Lawrence (Boston: Brill, 2014), 172.
Christine M. Kreamer and Adrienne L. Childs, eds., Conversations: African and African American Artworks in Dialogue: From the Collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and Camille O. and William H. Cosby Jr., exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Museum of African Art, 2014), 200 (repro.), 202, 205.
Samuel Willard Crompton and Charlotte Etinde-Crompton, Robert S. Duncanson: Landscape Painter (New York: Enslow Publishing, 2019), 64.
Naurice Frank Woods, Jr., Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Art: The Ascendency of Robert Duncanson, Edward Bannister, and Edmonia Lewis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021), 54.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson, “From Poetry into Paint: Robert S. Duncanson and The Song of Hiawatha,” in Intermedia: Terra Foundation Essays, Volume 6, ed. Ursula Frohne (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2022), 86, 88 (repro.).
