“To Preserve My Features in Marble”: Post-Civil War Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, and Sketches of Frederick Douglass. An Illustrated Essay

Image of Frederick Douglass from A Tribute for the Negro: Being a Vindication of the Moral … with Particular Reference to the African Race by Wilson Armistead. Courtesy of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.

“You asked my opinion of the portrait,” Frederick Douglass informed his white Irish editor and publisher, Richard Webb, regarding the frontispiece accompanying the publication of the first Dublin edition of his autobiography in a letter written from Edinburgh, Scotland, in January 1846, “I gave it, and still adhere to it. That the picture don’t suit is no fault of yours—or loss of yours—I am displeased with it not because I wish to be, but because I can[‘]t help it. I am cirtain [sic] the engraving is not as good, as the original portrait. I don’t like it, and I have said so without heart or thunder” (Letter to Richard Webb). For Douglass who spent a life-time engaged in stage-managing and choreographing the circulation of his face and body within a vast photographic archive over which he exerted full control, Webb’s newly commissioned “picture” traded in a white racist burlesque of Black humanity that offered nothing less than a grotesque insult to his “original portrait.”¹ Even a very brief glance at this “engraving” in which Douglass was misrepresented as excessively coiffured, exaggeratedly dandified, meticulously stylized, and half-smiling with his emotively charged, daguerreotyped portraits, both from this early period and later, is revealing. Appearing as the visual antithesis of this unknown artist’s caricatured distortion of Black manhood, he cultivated a tortured and traumatized facial expression across his body of stripped down and minimalist photographic portraits. Taken together, and as I argue elsewhere, these portraits constitute a series of “Sorrow images.”² Self-consciously engaged in creating an unprecedentedly extensive photographic archive consisting of portraits designed to circulate in hard-hitting contrast to white mainstream “pictures” for which any accurate, non-objectifying, and humanized portrayals of Black subjects were iconographically off-limits, Douglass engaged in artful strategies of self-representation. He fought not only to do justice to “the face” of “Frederick Douglass, the freeman” but of “Frederick Bailey, the slave” (Douglass and McKivigan 84–85). As I emphasize, Douglass cultivated an array of signifying strategies within his photographic portraits to dramatize the extent to which the realities—psychological, physical, philosophical, and existential—of a life lived in slavery continued to undergird his life as a seemingly free Black subject exposed to ongoing scenes of racist persecution and discrimination. Across the photographic likenesses he commissioned and controlled, he relied on the detailed intricacy of the daguerrean lens to capture every line on his physiognomy in a hard-hitting refutation of the pretensions toward accuracy of white artists’ typically gestural pencil lines, schematic brushwork, and undefined carving. Ultimately, Douglass endorsed self-representational strategies by which he conveyed the “inner” via the “outer man” and thereby ensured his status as the quintessential embodiment of the formerly enslaved and self-emancipated, yet still “fugitive,” Black subject (“Pictures and Progress” 455).

As even a cursory examination reveals, Douglass’s subjection to grotesque caricature as per Webb’s recommissioned portrait was no isolated incident. During the antebellum era and beyond, his face and body were bought and sold and readily available for mass consumption within a vast array of white racist ephemera which ran an iconographic gamut from proslavery propaganda illustrations to anti-abolitionist political cartoons. Especially prominent among these offensive images is the lithograph of white US satirist and artist, Edward Williams Clay, titled An Amalgamation Polka, dated 1845, the same year as the publication of the first US edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

As one of an extended series of works in which Clay signaled his virulent protest against Black radical abolitionism by adopting a white supremacist lens, here he no less envisioned the possibility of egalitarianism across racial divides as nothing less than a horrifying dystopia. Spectacularly to the fore...