Robert S. Duncanson Charted New Paths for Black Artists in 19th-Century America

It is not every day that a 19th-century landscape painter is the subject of national news, but that was the case last week, when a work by Robert S. Duncanson on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum was presented to the Biden administration by Congress as an inaugural gift. Duncanson is not a household name—or, at least, not an artist as well-known as some of his contemporaries, including William Louis Sonntag and Worthington Whitteredge. (When the New York Times covered the gift,