Hunting in the Woods

Robert Duncanson was a self-taught African American artist who was born free in Virginia and later resided in Michigan. An accomplished landscape painter, Duncanson made a significant sketching trip through the antebellum South in the summer of 1850, seeking compelling subject matter for his brush in Kentucky, Tennessee, and western North Carolina.

Duncanson is best remembered for romantic, utopic scenes, like this depiction of Native Americans hunting in a dark forest. Though deemed “the best landscape artist in the West” by the American press in the 1860s, Duncanson fell into obscurity after his death. Recent exhibitions and publications, as well as former First Lady Jill Biden’s selection of Duncanson’s Landscape with Rainbow as the 2021 presidential “inaugural painting,” have brought recognition to an artist of great historical import.