The Planter's Prospect

John Michael Vlach

"When nineteenth-century artists painted plantation scenes, they usually began with preparatory sketches made while standing in front of a planter's house or somewhere slightly below it. From either position, notes John Vlach, their gaze - and that of anyone who looked at the finished paintings - was necessarily directed upward. Instead of following the common compositional rule for landscape painting that called for a view from above, an outlook that fostered a feeling of mastery in the viewer, artists rendering plantation vistas employed a perspective that echoed the deference and respect the planter class assumed was its due.". "In The Planter's Prospect, Vlach explores these and other statements of power encoded in plantation landscapes. He focuses on six artists whose collective body of work spanned the period between 1800 and 1935 and documented plantations across the South,...

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