A Southern Cornfield, Nashville, Tennessee

  • Creator: Thomas Waterman Wood
  • Title: A Southern Cornfield, Nashville, Tennessee
  • Date: 1861
  • Description: This painting depicts eight African Americans of varying ages working in a field of corn, probably under a hot June sun. The moment shown appears to be a break for water.
  • Historical Note: Thomas Waterman Wood (1823-1903), a native of Vermont, trained as an artist in Boston and New York and traveled in Europe before settling in Nashville in 1859. He was drawn to the cosmopolitan southern city by the promise of portrait commissions, but he undertook this genre painting, for which he hired models, on his own. He left Nashville for the neutral territory of Louisville, Kentucky in 1862. What he had seen of African American life must have fascinated him, for he soon undertook a series of paintings that chronicled the transition from slavery to citizenship.
  • Institution: Wood Art Gallery, Montpelier, VT
  • Publisher: Digital Initiatives, James E. Walker Library, Middle Tennessee State University
  • Rights: Images reproduced on this website are intended for individual, educational use only. For research inquiries about specific objects or requests for high resolution images, contact the Wood Art Gallery.
  • URL: http://cdm15838.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/shades
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