The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War. The Proclamation changed the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as slaves escaped the control of their enslavers, either by fleeing to Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, they were permanently free. In addition, the Proclamation allowed for former slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States".
Grant DeVolson Wood was an American painter and representative of Regionalism, best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. He is particularly well known for American Gothic (1930), which has become an iconic example of early 20th-century American art.
John Steuart Curry was an American painter whose career spanned the years from 1924 until his death. He was noted for his paintings depicting rural life in his home state, Kansas. Along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, he was hailed as one of the three great painters of American Regionalism of the first half of the twentieth century. Curry's artistic production was varied, including paintings, book illustrations, prints, and posters.
Jonathan Eastman Johnson was an American painter and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with his name inscribed at its entrance. He was best known for his genre paintings, paintings of scenes from everyday life, and his portraits both of everyday people and prominent Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His later works often show the influence of the 17th-century Dutch masters, whom he studied in The Hague in the 1850s; he was known as The American Rembrandt in his day.
The Chazen Museum of Art is an art museum located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. The Chazen Museum of Art is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
American Regionalism is an American realist modern art movement that included paintings, murals, lithographs, and illustrations depicting realistic scenes of rural and small-town America primarily in the Midwest. It arose in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression, and ended in the 1940s due to the end of World War II and a lack of development within the movement. It reached its height of popularity from 1930 to 1935, as it was widely appreciated for its reassuring images of the American heartland during the Great Depression. Despite major stylistic differences between specific artists, Regionalist art in general was in a relatively conservative and traditionalist style that appealed to popular American sensibilities, while strictly opposing the perceived domination of French art.
Robert Seldon Duncanson was a 19th-century American landscapist of European and African ancestry. Inspired by famous American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, Duncanson created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second generation Hudson River School artist. Duncanson spent the majority of his career in Cincinnati, Ohio and helped develop the Ohio River Valley landscape tradition. As a free black man in antebellum America, Duncanson engaged the abolitionist community in America and England to support and promote his work. Duncanson is considered the first African-American artist to be internationally known. He operated in the cultural circles of Cincinnati, Detroit, Montreal, and London. The primary art historical debate centered on Duncanson concerns the role that contemporary racial issues played in his work. Some art historians, like Joseph D. Ketner, believe that Duncanson used racial metaphors in his artwork, while others, like Margaret Rose Vendryes, discourage viewers from approaching his art with a racialized perspective.
John Wilde was a painter, draughtsman and printmaker of fantastic imagery. Born near Milwaukee, Wilde lived most of his life in Wisconsin, save for service in the U.S. Army during World War II. He received bachelor and master degrees in art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught for some 35 years. Wilde was associated with the Magic Realism movement and Surrealism in the United States. His darkly humorous figurative imagery often included self-portraits through which he interacted with the people, animals and surreal objects that populate his fantasy world.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Maryland, a slave state, was one of the border states, straddling the South and North. Despite some popular support for the cause of the Confederate States of America, Maryland did not secede during the Civil War. Governor Thomas H. Hicks, despite his early sympathies for the South, helped prevent the state from seceding.
Aaron Bohrod was an American artist best known for his trompe-l'œil still-life paintings.
The Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman's Memorial or the Emancipation Group is a monument in Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was sometimes referred to as the "Lincoln Memorial" before the more prominent so-named memorial was dedicated in 1922.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences is one of the colleges of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Founded in 1889, the college has 17 academic departments, 23 undergraduate majors, and 49 graduate programs.
Richard Sprigg Steuart (1797–1876) was a Maryland physician and an early pioneer of the treatment of mental illness. In 1838 he inherited four contiguous farms, totalling approximately 1900 acres as well as 150 slaves.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin. Founded when Wisconsin achieved statehood in 1848, UW–Madison is the official state university of Wisconsin and the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It was the first public university established in Wisconsin and remains the oldest and largest public university in the state. It became a land-grant institution in 1866. The 933-acre (378 ha) main campus, located on the shores of Lake Mendota, includes four National Historic Landmarks. The university also owns and operates the 1,200-acre (486 ha) University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum, located 4 miles (6.4 km) south of the main campus, which is also a National Historic Landmark.
First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln is an 1864 oil-on-canvas painting by Francis Bicknell Carpenter. In the painting, Carpenter depicts Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, and his Cabinet members reading over the Emancipation Proclamation, which proclaimed the freedom of slaves in the ten states in rebellion against the Union in the American Civil War on January 1, 1863. Lincoln presented the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet on July 22, 1862 and issued it on September 22, 1862. The final Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863.
The law building is located on Bascom Hill on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus, at 975 Bascom Mall, Madison, Wisconsin.
Tragic Prelude is a mural painted by Kansan John Steuart Curry for the Kansas State Capitol building in Topeka, Kansas. It is located on the east side of the second floor rotunda. On the north wall it depicts abolitionist Kansan John Brown with a Bible in one hand, on which the Greek letters alpha and omega of Apocalypse 1:8 can be seen. In his other hand he holds a rifle, referred to as a "Beecher's Bible". He is in front of Union and Confederate soldiers, living and dead, with a tornado and a prairie fire approaching. Emigrants with covered wagons travel from east to west.
Ajax is an oil-on-canvas painting by the American artist John Steuart Curry, created in 1936–1937. It depicts a well-fed Hereford bull with two cowbirds on his back. The painting is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C..
Tornado over Kansas, or simply The Tornado, is a 1929 oil-on-canvas painting by the American Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry. It depicts a dramatic scene in which a family races for shelter as a tornado approaches their farm, and has compositional connections to Curry's earlier 1928 painting Baptism in Kansas. The artist is believed to have been influenced by Baroque art and photographs of tornadoes. He developed a fear of natural disasters and a reverence towards God during his childhood, both of which are apparent in the painting.
