The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings Book

"When nineteenth-century artists painted plantation scenes, they usually began with preparatory sketches made while standing in front of a planter's house or somewhere slightly below it. From either position, notes John Vlach, their gaze - and that of anyone who looked at the finished paintings - was necessarily directed upward. Instead of following the common compositional rule for landscape painting that called for a view from above, an outlook that fostered a feeling of mastery in the viewer, artists rendering plantation vistas employed a perspective that echoed the deference and respect the planter class assumed was its due." In The Planter's Prospect, Vlach explores these and other statements of power encoded in plantation landscapes. He focuses on six artists whose collective body of work spanned the period between 1800 and 1935 and documented plantations across the South, from Maryland to Louisiana. Framing thoughtful, in-depth analyses of plantation imagery in the work of Francis Guy, Charles Fraser, Adrien Persac, Fanny Palmer, William Aiken Walker, and Alice Ravenel Huger Smith are chapters that examine the formal features of plantation paintings and the social attitudes that influenced the way southern audiences looked at those paintings.