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Visions of Antiquity: Paintings of Robert Duncanson and Sculptures of Edmonia Lewis

Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2025-2026 season on September 24, 2025, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Tasha Vorderstrasse. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

In the middle of the 19th century, Robert Duncanson (1821-1872) and Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844-1907) created their unique visions for the ancient world, its ruins, and the people who lived in it. As successful Black American artists, their work reflected current trends in American art at the time, but at the same time was also innovative in its approach. As a landscape painter primarily based in Ohio, Robert Duncanson painted Italian ruins that he viewed during his visits to Italy on the Grand Tour. He represented Classical and Biblical stories in his paintings, but at the same time combined them with American imagery. In one of his most well-known works, Land of the Lotus-Eaters, he re-imagined the famous encounter between Odysseus and his men with the Lotus-Eaters from the Odyssey, moving the setting from the Mediterranean to North America and changing the Greeks and the Lotus-Eaters to European and Indigenous peoples respectively. He created imagined ancient landscapes and depicted modern landscapes with ruined buildings, but these landscapes themselves were also often at least partly imagined.

Albumen print of Robert S. Duncanson, artist, Montreal, QC, 1864 by William Notman, I-11979.1, Purchase, funds graciously donated by Maclean’s magazine, the Maxwell Cummings Family Foundation and Empire-Universal Films Ltd., McCord Stewart Museum.
Robert S. Duncanson, Vesuvius and Pompeii, 1870, oil on canvas, 10 x 15 5/8 in. (25.4 x 39.7 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Joseph Agostinelli, 1983.95.177.
Edmonia Lewis, who started sculpting a generation later, permanently lived outside of the United States, working in Italy. Her Neo-Classical sculpture also presented Classical and Biblical material, again notable for the distinctive approach to her subjects. Her celebrated work, The Death of Cleopatra, was (at the time of its display in 1876) praised for its historically accurate depiction of the queen; but at the same time, it was different from other depictions in that it showed Cleopatra VII as dead. Her work concentrated on the individuals who were living in the ancient world, rather than the ancient world itself. This presentation will examine the way in which both artists conceptualized the ancient world through different artistic media and the historical context in which they lived, specifically against the backdrop of the Abolitionist movement, the Civil War, and the racism that both experienced in the course of their careers. Both artists have received considerable attention recently, with Edmonia Lewis featuring on a United States postage stamp and receiving a Google doodle, and Robert Duncanson’s Landscape with Rainbow being selected by Dr. Jill Biden as the inaugural painting for President Joe Biden in 2021, showing that their artistic visions still speak to us today.
Photograph of Edmonia Lewis by Augustus Marshall, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2020.10.5.
Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, carved 1876, marble, 63 x 31 1/4 x 46 in. (160.0 x 79.4 x 116.8 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois, 1994.17.

Tasha Vorderstrasse is the Manager of the Continuing Education program at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia and North Africa (ISAC) at the University of Chicago. In her job, she coordinates the ISAC’s adult education program, in which she also teaches, in addition to giving ISAC Museum tours and providing other programming to University of Chicago students. She is also responsible for the ISAC social media pages. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of Chicago in 2004 and is interested in questions of how different forms of material culture can help us better understand how individuals constructed their identities over time. Her work on the reception of ancient and medieval West Asia and North Africa focuses on different ways in which various individuals understood and experienced the region, specifically looking at the collecting of antiquities, 19th-century photography, and how Black artists, historians, and intellectuals examined the ancient world.

Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2025-2026 season on September 24, 2025, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Tasha Vorderstrasse. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

SUPPORT THE WEBINAR PROGRAM!

Friends of ASOR is pleased to announce that the first webinars of the 2025-2026 season will once again be free and open to the public with a goal to raise $10,000 so that the entire webinar season will be free. Will you support this outreach effort with a tax-deductible contribution? All donors/sponsors with gifts of $100 or more will be recognized in subsequent webinars. Help ensure these webinars stay free and available to all by donating today!

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