Huntington Adds a Carpeaux

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Why Born Enslaved!, 1872 (model 1868). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, purchased with funds from the Art Collectors' Council, with additional support from the Frances Crandall Dyke Bequest, and the Caillouette Acquisition Endowment for British and Continental Art. Photo courtesy of Schoelkopf Gallery

The President wants to erase slavery from the nation's museums. Actually slavery was not a common theme for art prior to the 20th century. An exception is Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Why Born Enslaved!, recently purchased for the Huntington by its Art Collectors' Council. With few commissions for monumental sculpture after the fall of the Second Empire, Carpeaux and studio turned to domestically scaled multiples that could be marketed to bourgeois collectors. One of the most popular was Why Born Enslaved!, an image of a bound African woman representing the cruelty of slavery. It was produced in terracotta, plaster, bronze, and marble. The copies vary somewhat in size. The Huntington's terracotta is 23-1/2 in. high.

The sculpture's model is unrecorded, but some scholars believe she is the same woman depicted in Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier's 1861 Woman From the French Colonies.

Carpeaux's image has been popular with American and European curators. Just in the U.S., there are examples at the museums of New York (the Met has a marble and a terracotta), Brooklyn, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Houston. It inspired an uncanny Kara Walker sculpture and a 2022 show at the Metropolitan Museum. 

The Huntington does not have much French sculpture after Houdon. It plans to show Why Born Enslaved! in the American art galleries, apparently to compensate for the lack of an American treatment of the theme. 

Grafton Tyler Brown, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone from Lookout Point, 1887. The Huntington 

Black artists of the time generally had to avoid politics to make a living. The Huntington has also acquired a landscape painting by Grafton Tyler Brown (1841–1918), one of the first African Americans to have a successful art career in the Western U.S. The vertical-format Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone from Lookout Point, measuring 30 by 18 in., shows a Wyoming feature likened to Arizona's Grand Canyon. The canyon walls' yellow and rose hues are due to iron deposits.

Brown's painting was recently offered by Dolan/Maxwell for $95,000. At the Huntington, it joins works by two other Black landscape painters of the 19th century: Robert Scott Duncanson (1821–1872) and Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828–1901). 

Toshio Aoki, Untitled (Goddess),  about 1900. The Huntington

A watercolor Goddess by Toshio Aoki is a promised gift of Robert Hori. Aoki (1854–1912) was a Japanese-American artist whose trippy fantasies appealed to the arts and crafts circle and Gilded Age tycoons. Successful in his time, he fell off the radar until recently. LACMA bought an example of his work in 2005. 

Todd Gray, Rome Work (Niobe and her Chirren), 2023. The Huntington. (c) Todd Gray. Photo: Jeff McLane

Also new to the Huntington collection is a Todd Gray photo-based assemblage, Rome Work (Niobe and her Chirren). It and the above works will go in view in December 2025, with the reinstallation of six rooms of the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art.