Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, and: Young America: Childhood in 19th-Century Art and Culture, and: My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits in America (review)

These three books—two of them emerging from museum exhibitions, the other from a study of private and public image collections—take us into the visual world of the nineteenth century in very different ways. Of the three, Portraits of a People, by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, is by far the most useful volume for historians of early America. Based on original research, it engages with the questions that historians care about. Three essays provide contextual, closely argued analyses of the earliest views of African Americans in portraiture, of the creation and significance of the portrait engraving of the poet Phillis Wheatley, and of the career of Philadelphia's African American profile cutter, Moses Williams. Shaw then provides a chronological survey of portraits of free men and women of color, providing generally useful biographical detail and often illuminating short discussions of sitter, artist, and significance.

Shaw foregrounds her discussion with a lengthy quotation from Frederick Douglass, who maintained that the real portraiture of black subjects by white artists was virtually impossible, because whites could not see blacks as fully human. Shaw works against the grain to find and interpret images that belie or at least soften Douglass's bitter certainty, and she has found true portraits. Douglass himself, in all his fierce intelligence, leaps out from the page in both a painting and a daguerreotype. Shaw shows us how some American painters, including a few artists of color and antislavery sympathizers like William Matthew Prior, produced fully realized and respectful portraits of striving African American men and women. Yet, as she reminds us, these were rare; they must be seen as a trickle against the flood of hundreds of thousands of comic stereotypes and vicious caricatures that were drawn and published.

The Wheatley essay is particularly interesting, providing the poet's frontispiece portrait—as opposed to her poetry—with its first really serious analysis. Shaw makes a good case that it is a revolutionary image, depicting a black female as a genteel woman and a writer. Shaw might at times be guilty of interpretive overreach—it's not clear that this relatively simple, although nicely executed, portrait engraving can hold up the weight of symbolic interpretation she would like to place on it—but is always interesting and provocative. For those of us interested in how portraits represent the self and reveal the social order, this is an important study.

Claire Perry's Young America: Childhood in 19^th-Century Art and Culture, emerges out of an exhibition that gave this reviewer a good deal to look at and think about. Perry has assembled many interesting images and often provides provocative and useful interpretations of individual works. However, the book breaks no new historical ground.

Young America's thematic organization mirrors the class, race, and gender concerns of most social history; it looks sequentially at the country boy, the daughter of liberty, the children of bondage, the African American child, the ragamuffin or urban waif, the papoose, and the child in school. The themes hang together reasonably well, except for the section on the "Papoose"; the discussion of the images of Native American children seemed tacked on.

Young America makes abundant reference to the standard themes of historical transformation—industrialization, urbanization, westward migration and settlement, changes in women's roles, and African American emancipation—but uses them to uneven effect. Based on secondary sources, the discussion lacks the tight time-specific contextual interpretation that...