Molly K. Eckel

This dissertation explores how the oeuvre of the Black landscape painter Robert S. Duncanson (1821–1872) intervened in the evolving debates over slavery, abolition, and Black enfranchisement in the nineteenth century. In three chapters, each anchored by a single painting by Duncanson, The Vulture and Its Prey (1844), Robbing the Eagle’s Nest (1856), and The Caves (1869), I explore how the artist revised conventions of natural history, translated literary sources, and pictured abolitionist rhetoric in his landscapes. Non-human elements—hawks, eagles, sparrows, and the geographic features of cliffs and caves—emerge as potent, flexible metaphors that both critiqued contemporary United States’ politics and envisioned a post-slavery future. By braiding visual analysis and new biographical research with recent scholarship on the history of Black activism, I situate Duncanson’s works within specific debates about the body politic of the United States over the course of his lifetime and career. Ultimately, this dissertation positions Duncanson as part of an interracial network of artists, activists, and political thinkers whose work reimagined foundational American ideals of freedom, human rights, and citizenship in the era of slavery and abolition.