Robert S. Duncanson, Race, and Auguste Comte’s Positivism in Cincinnati

On June 29, 1871, African American landscape painter Robert S. Duncanson [Figure 1] wrote a letter in response to his son’s accusation that Duncanson had tried to pass for white. By that point in his career, Duncanson, who had begun his career as an artisanal house painter, had achieved renown as an artist, or, as he said, a fame “second to none” in the United States. In his letter, written from Cincinnati, the artist first noted that he had recently received an offer of financial support from one whom he describes as a member of the very race that his son despises—and notes his son’s own condition of financial dependence. He went on to say, “my heart has always been with the down-trodden race,” but that he had the right to choose his own company. Then, in a clever turn of phrase that both emphasizes the actuality of a black and white racial binary and then rejects it as false, or at least as irrelevant to him, he concluded by saying: “Mark what I say here in black and white: I have no color on the brain, all I have on the brain is paint,” and finally, “I care not for color: ‘Love is my principle, order is the basis, progress is the end.’”¹

That final phrase is a direct reference to sociologist Auguste Comte’s “L’Amour pour principe, l’Ordre pour base et le Progress pour but,” a motto that inspired many leaders and thinkers not only in the English-speaking world, but also in Latin America. Comte’s philosophy of Positivism, the theory that observable and understandable laws dictate human social behavior, and especially the role he gave to altruism, was influential with a wide spectrum of liberal reformers. Love, or feeling for other men—the social sympathies or altruism, a term Comte invented—is the biological “principle” behind Positivism, not individual self-interest. Reason or scientific investigation reveals the stable “order” underlying the historical and present conditions of human life, while imaginative idealizations of the truth, such as art, stimulate progress by cultivating the social sympathies and spurring men and women to modify their environment.²

Duncanson’s letter was published by art historian James Dallas Parks in 1980, and ever since it has been cited as evidence of Duncanson’s attitude toward race politics in the United States. Joseph Ketner, in his invaluable monograph on the artist, finds a parallel between Duncanson’s denial of concern with racial issues and his landscapes that conform to mainstream Hudson River School aesthetics. Ketner, for example, suggests that Duncanson’s 1852 Garden of Eden [Figure 2], which is based on a painting by Thomas Cole, reveals that his apparent adherence to conventional artistic ideals veiled an African American perspective; paradise with its palm trees might also be the promised land of slave songs. David Lubin, in a thoughtful study of the theme of passing in the artist’s life and work, also finds a double consciousness operating in Duncanson’s paintings, positing that they may have contained hidden allegories on racial themes whose meanings were available only to certain audiences. Margaret Rose Vendryes observes that the painter may have sympathized with slaves but did not see himself as a member of the down-trodden race. She argues that his claim to the right to transcend racial classifications represents his position as an educated freeman in antebellum Cincinnati, where economic, cultural, and social differences would have been respected in African American communities.³

What seems contradictory about Duncanson’s views and in need of explanation is that the desire to be understood as an artist first, not a colored artist, or even an abolitionist artist, indicates he had assimilated a middle-class ideology of individual achievement that, despite its claims to universality, excluded most African Americans. That ideology defined respectability not on the grounds of birth, occupation, or ostensibly even race, but as a constellation of character traits such as industry, modesty, and self-control.⁴ This belief in the determining force of individual character opened...