Artist Bio
Duncanson, Robert Scott
(1821-1872) Robert Duncanson was a major figure in the mid-19th century
group of Ohio River Valley painters, and during his lifetime earned a
reputation as the best landscape painter in the western United States.
The son of a free African-American mother and a Scottish-Canadian
father, Duncanson was apprenticed in his youth to his family’s
housepainting and carpentry business in Canada. He was self-taught as
an artist and began his career first by copying popular prints and
later portraits and historical subjects. He worked as an itinerant
painter between Detroit and Cincinnati, where he advertised himself as
a “daguerreotype artist.” He made frequent sketching trips to the
mid-West, New England, and Canada, but always returned to Cincinnati,
the city with which he is most closely associated. In the early 1850s
he received a commission from Nicholas Longworth, a wealthy Cincinnati
arts patron and abolitionist, to execute a series of murals for his
home, Belmont. This commission was the largest single project of
Duncanson’s career and enabled him to undertake his first grand tour of
Europe. He traveled to England and Europe several times, first in the
company of painters William Sonntag and John Robinson Tait. His work
was well received in England, where he was welcomed by aristocratic
anti-abolitionists. Duncanson traveled through Scotland, exhibiting and
making sketches that would culminate in a series of successful
landscape paintings. His travels in Italy introduced elements of
fantasy and exoticism to the work of his mid-career, just as the
extreme wilderness of Canada influenced his later painting, which
inclined toward greater detail and observation of nature. He exhibited
in Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago and Montreal. Duncanson married twice,
and had two children from each marriage. While always excitable and
garrulous, Duncanson suffered increasingly from delusions,
hallucinations, and anxiety as the years went on. He was hospitalized
at the Michigan State Retreat, a sanitarium, and died just before
Christmas in 1872. Today his works are found in major museums
collections throughout the United States and at Balmoral Castle,
Scotland.