Eldon M Thomas Post 3

     I recently went on a trip to the Newark Museum with my Development of Modern Art Class. It was a Sunday and I was not enthused by this at all. We went to see the Angels and Tomboys Exhibit which was a series of paintings from the late nineteenth century of children ranging from toddlers to teens. Most of the paintings were decent but only one or two stood out for me. In this essay I will compare this painting to a Modernist painting from my class studies.
     The painting Kept In, by Edward Lamson Henry was the painting that I caught my eye. Most of the other paintings were mostly portraits of patrons' children or the offspring of the artists themselves. This one on the other hand was of a young African American girl who was left in a classroom while her classmates played outside. This painting was inspired by the artist's time as a clerk on a Union transport ship during the American Civil War. It plays on the theme of isolation and race.
     The Modernist painting that I chose that also deals with the subject of isolation is Pablo Picasso's Family of Saltimbanque. This painting was done during the artist's rose period and depicts circus performers and the isolation they feel. Like Henry's painting, this also deals with the subject of race in that the performers are Gypsies. Gypsies were often mistreated in Europe and disliked even to this day and often lived a nomadic life. These two paintings stood out to me because of the subject matter and the race issue.
     Both of these paintings depict the isolation that people of color face in societies where race superiority and ethnocentrism are present. In Henry's painting we find an African girl in a school setting at a time after the end of America's chattel slavery. During that time, African slaves were not allowed to read and write. This little girl is in a school and she is kept in the class by herself, isolated accompanied only by her daydreams.
     Picasso's painting depicts Gypsy circus performers. Like African Americans at the turn of the 19th century, they were disliked by most Europeans. Like African Americans, they are disliked even to this day. Like African Americans in America's South they faced persecution and death even up to the World War II era where they were victims of Hitler's Final Solution. Like Henry's painting, these people are also isolated and sad. Unlike Henry's painting though, they have each other. Both of these paintings depict children with sad little faces.
     Both Henry and Picasso's paintings have little girls in them. In Henry's painting, the little girl is the subject matter while Picasso doesn't show his little girl's face. The boy's face is shown but the girl has her back to the audience. Henry's little girl is staring off canvas to the outside of the room with a sense of longing to play outside with her classmates. Both of these paintings treat gender in different ways.
     Henry's painting was done around the time of the Impressionist movement in Europe while Picasso's was done around the time of Post-Impressionism and Symbolism. Picasso's work would be considered Modernist because of the way he treats his subjects and their environment. Rather than paint his performers in a circus, he paints them in a barren landscape with barley any hint of time or space.
     To conclude I say that both paintings represent different approaches to subject matter. Both paintings break from the norm of only painting people of a particular ethnic background and depict the isolation the subjects faced.

Pablo Picasso. Family of Saltimbanque. 1905.

Edward Lamson Henry. Kept In. 1889.

Works Cited

Hunter, Sam., Jacobus, John., and Daniel Wheeler. Modern Art. 3rd Ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. Print.
Henry, Edward Lamson. Kept In. Oil on canvas. 1889.  Newark Museum