While we don’t know its exact location, this pastoral scene caught Robert S. Duncanson’s eye shortly after the artist visited Pittsburgh in July 1852. It was still early in his career, before he became the first African American artist to garner an international reputation and the title of “the greatest landscape painter in the West.” Duncanson was in Pittsburgh during a tour of his first historical landscape, The Garden of Eden. He would eventually give that monumental painting to the Rev. Charles Avery, a white minister and philanthropist who was a member of Pittsburgh’s Underground Railroad, “for his generosity and friendship” toward African Americans. Duncanson’s gift was in recognition of Avery’s 1849 founding of the Allegheny Institute, the first college for African Americans in Allegheny County. Acquired by Carnegie Museum of Art in 2018, American Landscape is currently on view in A Pittsburgh Anthology.
American Landscape by Robert S. Duncanson
While we don’t know its exact location, this pastoral scene caught Robert S. Duncanson’s eye shortly after the artist visited Pittsburgh in July 1852. It was still early in his
