Landscape with Rainbow (Duncanson)
Landscape with Rainbow is an oil on canvas painting by the African-American artist Robert S. Duncanson. The Hudson River School landscape painting was completed in 1859, while Duncanson was living in Cincinnati, Ohio. It has been in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. since 1983. Background Duncanson was born in Fayette, New York, in 1821, and he moved to Cincinnati by 1841, where he initially worked as a house painter. He joined the town's strong artistic community, which led to Cincinnati becoming known as the "Athens of the West". Duncanson's landscape art drew patrons, and he worked alongside fellow landscape artist William Louis Sonntag. They travelled to Europe together in 1853-54, where they studied the works of landscape masters including Claude Lorrain and J. M. W. Turner. Two years after Landscape with Rainbow, Duncanson completed his largest work, The Land of the Lotus Eaters in 1861, inspired by the similarly-named 1832 poem of Alfred Tennyson and by Frederic Church's 1859 painting Heart of the Andes. Duncanson became uncomfortable in Cincinnati as the American Civil War progressed, due to the proximity of Covington in the slave-owning border state of Kentucky across the Ohio River. He left