Slave Market

A black man, large as life, holding the reins of a white horse in one hand while he plunges a dagger into its throat with the other, is given great prominence...

~~In the spring of 1867, the New York correspondent for San Francisco’s Alta California filed a report on his visit to the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design, the nation’s most prestigious art establishment. The...

Sometime between 1883 and 1885, a colleague photographed Thomas Eakins unclothed and holding aloft a naked female student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (fig. 1). In recent decades, this image has been tendered as the most tangible proof of the artist’s indiscretions. Although the scene undoubtedly is worthy of critique, it also is worth noting that Eakins hardly was the first indiscreet Philadelphian. More than a century before that shutter snapped, Charles Willson Peale sketched …