Lisa C. Tolbert’s scientific contributions

Civil War History 49.4 (2003) 401-404 With The Planter's Prospect John Vlach provides the first book to critically evaluate successive generations of plantation landscape art in historical context. Though the artists he studied worked in isolation from each other and their works show almost no recognition of useful artistic antecedents or historical models, Vlach finds compelling evidence of a plantation narrative that "emerges only in retrospect, only after revisiting the choices made by each subsequent generation" (47). After an opening chapter that provides an historical overview of plantation images, the book focuses on the plantation paintings of six artists whose collective body of work spans the period from 1800 to 1935 and documents plantations across the south from Maryland to Louisiana. By far the greatest emphasis in the book, however, is on images and artists of the lowcountry and Deep South. Though the title emphasizes paintings, Vlach also considers watercolors, drawings, map illustrations, lithographs, and popular prints. Vlach discovers that Southern plantation landscapes departed from the central feature of American landscape paintings of the nineteenth century, which typically used a vantage point from a high place, a bird's eye view, that emphasized the sense of mastery expressed in the nationalistic ideology of Manifest Destiny. In contrast, plantation painters usually took a position standing in front of or slightly below the planter's house. The viewer's gaze was thereby directed upwards toward the front of the house to emphasize the presumed authority of the planter. By far the most important feature of Southern plantation paintings for Vlach is the absence of African American fieldhands who worked the land, especially significant when one considers the historical and social context of the black majority that resided on the lowcountry and Deep South plantations overwhelmingly depicted in plantation art. Because Vlach considers not only the aesthetics of art, but also its powerful social and cultural meanings, he evaluates the content of pictures in social and historical context and finds that their content changed over time in significant ways. Before the Civil War, plantation paintings tended to be house portraits that eliminated the working components of plantations—fields, crops, livestock, slaves, and farming work at or beyond the margins—to focus on the mansion house and front yard. African Americans were almost entirely missing. Artists were typically commissioned by particular planters to produce topographical landscapes: "more than renderings of scenery, these paintings were, for the most part, attempts at the faithful depiction of a specific, identifiable locality" (3). Such paintings hung on the walls of private homes, viewed only by a select few. Before the 1850s, most Americans saw images of plantations only by thumbing through pages of illustrated travel books or buying tickets to see moving panoramas or minstrel shows. After the Civil War and emancipation, fascination with the Southern landscape became more widespread and painters produced a new plantation narrative that evoked a romanticized Old South. The new, postemancipation view of the plantation emphasized fields and highlighted the work of black fieldhands, still toiling according to instructions of masters. Such a narrative supported a nostalgic vision of power relations in which black subservience was ostensibly restored. Though their work was more prominently featured as a subject of plantation art, African Americans were typically rendered as anonymous figures in a landscape rather than as individuals. The six artists whose work Vlach evaluates include both well-known professionals and obscure amateurs. All produced multiple works that Vlach argues made plantation landscapes an important aspect of their artistic production, though their motivations for producing these plantation scenes varied widely from personal artistic experimentation and reflection to commercial enterprise. All of the artists edited elements of the plantation landscape, especially the black majority that worked the land, to present reassuring images of the beauty and productivity of the plantation system (including, ironically, the Currier & Ives artist, Fanny Palmer, whose plantation scenes developed a moral narrative of Southern defeat in the Civil War era). Three painters' works constitute the pre-Civil War plantation...