Blue Hole, Flood Waters of the Little Miami River

In the middle of Duncanson's Blue Hole, three tiny fishermen are visible at the shore of the river. The scene looks like an untouched wilderness. It is a real place: the Blue Hole on the Little Miami River, east of Dayton, Ohio, still there today in John Bryan State Park. Duncanson stood on that specific bank in 1851 and sketched from life. He was born free in New York in 1821 and moved to Cincinnati at nineteen. By the 1850s Duncanson was one of the leading landscape painters in the United States. His abolitionist patrons in Cincinnati funded a full European tour. This is a Hudson River School painting made by an African American in 1851, a decade before the Civil War. Now at Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati @cincyartmuseum