William Sidney Mount.
William Sidney Mount, one of America’s finest 19th-century genre, or scene,
painters, created glorious portraits of Black and multiracial people, among
others. In politics, he was a Jacksonian Democrat, who favored states’ rights
to choose slavery as America’s borders expanded westward. Later on, he would
vote against Lincoln. And yet, unlike most White artists of the mid-1800s, who
portrayed Black people in demeaning caricatures, Mount painted his subjects
with humanity, realism, and psychological depth. Before the Civil War,
photography wasn’t common and Black individuals were rarely portrayed in fine
art. Mount’s paintings are extremely valuable to the historical record both
because of their rarity and their quality. Out of several hundred paintings
Mount made in his lifetime, his dozen works that feature Black and multiracial
individuals are among his best.
Mount lived his whole life on the rural North Shore of Long Island, N.Y.,
aside from several years in Manhattan. He never married. From the local
farming homesteads, held by his siblings, extended family, and their
neighbors, he chose his models, both Black and White. He was also a fiddler,
and he liked to illustrate country folk, both Black and White, making music.
Due to New York’s partial manumission acts beginning in 1799 and the state’s
abolition of slavery in 1827, all Mount’s Black models were free.
Wealthy, White, urban, East Coast businessmen, such as Henry Breevort Jr.,
Edward L. Carey, Gouverneur Kemble, and Luman Reed purchased Mount’s rural
scenes of the 1830s and 1840s. “Yankee” themed artwork became popular in
America during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, from 1829 to 1837, which Jackson
billed as the “era of the common man.” Mount’s farming scenes won him
accolades at the National Academy of Design exhibitions in Manhattan. Racial
diversity added to the marketability of such paintings, but with one
caveat—that Black and White individuals be segregated within the illustration.
As art historian Elizabeth Johns points out, White American buyers were not
interested in artwork that challenged the existing segregated and hierarchical
social order.
In the 1850s, Mount created three large portraits of Black and multiracial
musicians for an entirely different clientele: European buyers of lithographic
prints. Mount’s New York agent for the Paris-based international art
dealership, Goupil, Vibert & Co. (later Goupil and Co.), commissioned
paintings that put Black people front and center in the composition. Europeans
were apparently more open-minded about portraying Black people than were their
American counterparts.
This portfolio is adapted from The Art of William Sidney Mount: Long
Island People of Color on Canvas , The History
Press, 2022, $23.99
The Mount House. Artist Mount spent the bulk of
his life on Long Island, N.Y., which was very rural at the time. He painted
this image of his home in 1854. 
Eel Spearing at Setauket
(1845) is one of the few works of fine art from early or mid-19th century
America that features a Black woman. As such, it was considered controversial
among the affluent, White audience in New York who saw the painting exhibited
at the National Academy of Design. Several art critics found the subject
matter of the “negress” to be in poor taste for a painting on public view.
Today the work is considered to be one of the best of its era in America. The
white, two-story building in the background of the scene with its accompanying
farm is St. George’s Manor on Strong’s Neck in Setauket, Long Island.
Manhattan attorney George Washington Strong (1783-1855), who commissioned the
work, had grown up at St. George’s; the newly built manor house shown here
belonged to one of his older brothers, the Honorable Selah Brewster Strong I,
a congressman (1792-1872). A childhood memory of the Strongs may have inspired
the painting’s subject matter, though Mount himself had fond recollections of
spearfishing as a boy with an elderly, enslaved Black man named Hector.
Spearfishing along the protected waters of Strong’s Neck was a common activity
in Mount’s time, as it had been for centuries among the native Setalcotts.
Selah Brewster Strong’s 10-year-old son Judd (Thomas Shepard Strong II,
1834-1909) served as the model for the boy in the skiff. No documentation
exists to tell us the name of the eel-spearing woman. She may have been
Rachael Youngs Tobias (1805-1866), who was born into slavery at St. George’s
Manor. Another possibility is that she was Rachel Brewster (1799-c. 1880), a
woman of Black and Native American ancestry who grew up in Setauket’s Brewster
House, shown in Mount’s painting Long Island Farmhouses (1862-1863). Mount was
closely affiliated with both the Strong and Brewster families and would have
known each of these women from childhood years and beyond. 
Mount painted Rustic Dance After a Sleigh Ride
(1830) when he was only 23 years old. This simple scene of couples dancing in
a crowded inn earned Mount his first sale and his first award in an art
exhibition at New York’s National Academy of Design, where he had studied.
Mount enjoyed the satiric engravings of British artist William Hogarth, among
others, who illustrated comic characters and storylines. The story here, a
romantic vignette, involves a man in an olive green waistcoat and trousers,
who looks on in shock as the woman in a white gown steps out onto the dance
floor with another man. Compared to Mount’s later paintings, his figures, both
Black and White, are clumsily rendered and their faces have a sameness to
them. His Black fiddler resembles the stereotypical Black caricatures in 19th-
century cartoons. The other two Black figures in the composition, the coachman
in the red cap and the man holding the bellows, are equally stereotypical with
their childlike, grinning faces. Seventeen years later, Mount’s skills in
realistic portraiture had progressed to an extraordinary degree when he
painted a biracial fiddler in Right and Left (1847). The room shown in Rustic
Dance is believed to be the main room in the Hawkins-Mount House in Stony
Brook (c. 1725, enlarged 1757), where Mount lived from the age of six into his
teenage years, and for periods afterward. Mount recalled a talented Black
fiddler named Anthony Hannibal Clapp (1749-1816) he had known as a child.
Clapp was possibly Mount’s inspiration for the fiddler in Rustic Dance.
Wilhelm
(William) Schaus, Mount’s agent for lithographic prints at the firm Goupil,
Vibert & Co. liked Mount’s painting of a White fiddler, Just in Tune (1849),
and asked Mount to paint a Black fiddler. The result was Mount’s magnificent
portrait Right and Left (1850). Subsequently, Schaus asked Mount to
paint two more portraits of Black musicians, a banjo player, and a bones
player. Mount’s musical portraits are reminiscent of the works of 17th-century
Dutch master Frans Hals, whose vivid, expressive figures assumed the same
three-quarter length poses. Eloquent and psychologically rich, Right and Left
marked a vast departure from the racist caricatures of Black fiddlers shown in
newspaper cartoons, and on theatre billboards and sheet music covers during
Mount’s time. The fiddler’s attire indicates that the picture is meant to be
of a traveling performer. The horseshoe hung on the wall behind him may
symbolize the variable luck of a musician’s life. The title of the painting
carries a double meaning. Mount’s fiddler is left-handed, and “right and
left,” is a square-dance term. To Mount’s annoyance, when this painting was
copied as a lithograph, the artist flipped the figure as a mirror image,
making the fiddler right-handed. Mount’s model for this portrait may have been
Henry (Harry) Brazier (c. 1817-1895), a biracial man who lived in Smithtown
and Mastic, Long Island, and was known to play the fiddle.
this article first appeared in American history magazine
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Farmers Nooning (1836) brings us to a field
during harvest time when a group of young men and boys take a break from their
labors. The reclining figure of the Black man looks as though he could be
having a good dream. A young, White boy wearing a Scottish-style
tam-o’-shanter, playfully tickles his ear with a piece of straw. One of the
others in the group sharpens farm tools, preparing for the work still ahead.
Art historian Elizabeth Johns suggests that Farmers Nooning conveys an
encrypted political message regarding the dangers of abolitionism. The boy’s
tam-o’-shanter, she says, symbolizes the English and Scottish antislavery
groups that funded American abolitionists. The ear tickling, she says, is a
visual representation of an expression popular in pre-Civil War America about
“filling the naive listener’s mind with promises.” Another art historian,
Deborah Johnson, interprets the Black man as “in a liminal state, suspended
between the slumber of slavery and the awakening of emancipation.” The model
for the reclining Black man is believed to be Abner Mills of Smithtown, Long
Island, who worked on the Mills Pond estate owned by Mount’s distant cousins.
One of Abner’s older, half-brothers was Robbin Mills, Mount’s model for The
Power of Music. The models for the other figures in Farmers Nooning are likely
the sons of Mount’s sister, Ruth Seabury. 
The cattle-bone clappers in the
musician’s hands make fast, clickety sounds similar to the taps of a tap
dancer. The jug and glass in The Bone Player (1856) suggest the musician
is in a tavern, and the box in which he carries his “bones” suggests he is a
traveling performer. His elegant clothes, including his knotted red silk
scarf, further indicate that the performer is a minstrel. Nineteenth-century
Blackface groups each typically had a bones player (as well as a fiddler,
banjo player, and tambourine player). Because of this, some historians view
this painting in a racist context; they suggest that William Schaus, Mount’s
agent, purposed the subject matter of a bones player to Mount because of the
popularity of Blackface groups that performed in tawdry, raucous halls in the
Five Points district in lower Manhattan at the time. It is not known how
Schaus, a German emigré, and a representative of a Paris-based firm for fine
art, learned about bones players. In any case, Mount’s magnificent musician is
painted in an ennobling European style, and purchases of this image as a
lithograph were mostly overseas in cities such as London and Paris. Mount’s
model for The Bone Player was 40-year-old Andrew Brewster (1808–after 1860), a
farmhand who worked for Mount’s brother, Robert Nelson Mount. Andrew was born
in the Brewster House in Setauket, portrayed in Long Island Farmhouses. He
lived there, and in the adjoining house on the property, for most of his life.
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The Joseph Brewster House, 1665, in Setauket, Long Island, N.Y., was home to
six generations of Brewsters, both the White families and the Black families
of the same name who worked for them. The colonial “saltbox” house at the
foreground of Long Island Farmhouses (1862-63) is now a museum run by
the Ward Melville Heritage Organization. In Mount’s time, as this picture
shows, two adjoining houses stood on the property, as well as accompanying
barns and other structures that were part of a farm of several hundred acres.
One of Mount’s brothers, Robert Nelson Mount, a fiddler and dance teacher,
married Mary J. Thompson Brewster, and the couple lived in the house in the
painting’s background. Mount himself boarded with them on and off, at least
twice in his lifetime, and it was in this house where Mount passed away in
1868. Two of the farmhands from this joint property modeled for Mount: George
Freeman, The Banjo Player, and Andrew Brewster, The Bone Player. Andrew’s
sister, Rachel Brewster, was possibly Mount’s model for the woman in Eel
Spearing at Setauket. 
Dance of the Haymakers (1845)
takes us to a joyous celebration in a barn at the end of a harvest day. The
two men at the center dance the quick steps of the hornpipe in sync, and
possibly in a friendly competition to see who can outdo the other. Mount
enjoyed dancing and playing music himself (the fiddle and flute) and his rural
life gave him many opportunities to record such gatherings with his pencil and
tiny sketchbook he carried in his pocket. In his sketches and paintings,
Mount’s dancers and musicians are sometimes Black and sometimes White, and
those watching them are sometimes Black and sometimes White. Today it makes
for an interesting cultural discussion that both Black and White people appear
in Mount’s artworks in interchangeable roles, albeit in separate areas of the
compositions. These multiracial scenes suggest that 19th-century society, at
least on Long Island, was not as segregated as was once believed. Most of the
real-life models in Dance of the Haymakers are well-documented as Stony Brook
residents and friends of Mount. The fiddler is Mount’s second cousin Shepard
“Shep” Jones; the dancers, left to right, are Tom Briggs and Wesley Ruland;
the spectator behind the fiddle is Horace Newton; the man seated on the box is
Billy Biggs; and the boy with the flail is Joe Jayne. The people in the loft,
peering out of the darkness, could be Mary Brewster and her biracial daughter,
Phelena Seabury, who were connected to the household of Mount’s sister and
brother-in-law, Ruth and Charles Saltonstall Seabury. Mount dressed his model as a
jaunty stagecoach driver. The shiny object that hangs around his neck is a
bugle mouthpiece; coachmen used bugles as drivers use car horns today. The
striped cap may also signify the dress of a coachman. The figure of The
Banjo Player (1856) has great vitality, and all the musical details of the
painting, including the expensive, calfskin model of the banjo (manufactured
by the William Boucher Banjo Company of Baltimore) and the careful way Mount
positioned the subject’s hands (performing the “claw hammer” style), are
technically accurate. Most of all it is the young man’s sense of joyousness
that makes this painting one of Mount’s most popular and enduring. The model
for the work was George Freeman (1835-1880), a 21-year-old farmhand indentured
to John Brewster, owner of the Brewster House (shown in the painting Long
Island Farmhouses). Andrew Brewster, Mount’s model for The Bone Player, who
was nearly twice George’s age, also lived within the joint Mount–Brewster
household. As he did for all of his portraits, Mount worked slowly and with
precision when he made The Banjo Player. Mount wrote in his diary that he
completed the painting in eight days, with his model posing for him twice a
day. According to one of Mount’s nephews, Mount particularly enjoyed the
company of George Freeman as he was creating the painting. Mount owned a
flute, several violins, and several hundred musical scores, both classical and
folk, including African American tunes such as “Possum Up a Gum Stump.”
There’s no record of anyone in the Mount or Brewster families owning a banjo,
however. Whether it was an instrument George Freeman played remains a mystery.
This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.
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