| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings. By John Michael Vlach. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii, 216 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2686-3. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-5352-6.)

In this compact, straightforward book, John Michael Vlach takes as his subject the innumerable paintings of distant expanses of fields and manor houses, many of them populated by scattered groups of mute, minute, and faceless black workers. An often mundane and repetitive group of images, they have generally failed to excite the interest of scholars of landscape painting (one searches fruitlessly for any shred of the characteristic sublimity of northern views of rugged mountains and forests). Similarly, historians probing the iconography of race and slavery have gravitated toward more canonical genre paintings, which feature close-up human interactions and explicit narratives. Instead, Vlach focuses on six rather obscure topographical artists whose work spans nearly 150 years. It is a remarkable assemblage of imagery almost never contemplated by mainstream art history.

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