The Present

A Black woman sits in a darkened kitchen near a smoldering fire. Wrapped in a shawl and smoking a pipe, she turns toward us. On the wall above the stove, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln with a feather behind it (likely signifying flight or freedom) suggests that the woman is, or soon will be, emancipated.

Thomas Satterwhite Noble made this painting in July 1865, the same month that he surrendered from the Confederate army after four years of service. His paintings related to slavery, made between 1865 and 1870, were his largest commercial success. He sold them primarily to businessmen and industrialists for as much as $10,000 (approximately $160,000 today).

This painting was part of a trilogy titled The Past, Present, and Future Conditions of the Negro. Its presentation of a “civilizing narrative” for previously enslaved people, while common at the time, is racist. The artist’s identity as a white man, former Confederate soldier, and son of a slaveholder introduces further questions regarding his motivations: were these paintings a form of atonement for his past actions? Or do these imagined scenes of Black American life, and the financial gains he enjoyed from selling them, amount to a continued form of exploitation?