son of free African-Americans; father was house painter/carpenter
self-taught
1840s – itinerant artist travelling between Cincinnati and Detroit
1848 – Cincinnati lawyer Nicolas Longsworth commissions 8 landscape panels for his home (Taft Museum, Cincinnati)
1853 – travels in Europe with landscape painter William Lewis Sonntag
1865 – exhibits at International Exposition in Dublin
1866 – returns to Cincinnati; begins suffering from dementia
1872 – experiences nervous breakdown; dies at the Michigan State Retreat
Europe (1853); Scotland, England, Ireland (1865)
Senator Leis Cass; James G. Birney, editor of The Philanthropist
Blue Hole, Little Miami River, 1851 (Cincinnati Art Museum)
Ketner, Joseph D. The Emergence of the African-American Artist: Robert S. Duncanson, 1821-1972. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1993
Vendryes, Margaret Rose. “Race Identity/Identifying Race: Robert S. Duncanson and Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (2001): 82-99