MS01.01.03.B01.F25.049

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The most acceptable as well as the most stereotypic image
of Blacks being produced during the post Civil War period came
from the hand of William Aiken Walker, a native of Charleston,
South Carolina. Walker's first recorded painting was done in
1850 when he was 12 years old. Its subject was said to be a
[u]Negro on the Docks of Charleston[/u]. By far the lesser craftsman
among all 19th century artists whom I have cited, Walker, however
was the most prolific and produced more images with black subjects
than any other white American artist of the period. He was
trained as a photographer and often painted directly from his
shots of black life and genre, thus the stiff, scarecrow type
figures that stand motionless against the southern landscape so
often seen in his work. View of Blacks in cotton fields, (Walker
series 48-56--Slides 1 through 16) hoeing cotton, warf scenes,
Blacks travelling and goodtiming along the way, market scenes,
harvesting crops and cabin scenes are among the many images Walker
created in which the subjects were often anatomically ill proportioned
and used in the same manner that one would use dolls or
other lifeless props in still life.

His important, major contribution can be seen as a chronicle
of Black life in the postwar South. This account of Walker's art
reveals the sentimental feelings white writers showed when viewing
his work: The New Orleans [u]Daily Picayune[/u], November 30, 1884,
writes (P.2) "Walker's drawings of the Negro in his native cotton
and cane fields is immutable given with all of the half pathetic
raggedness of costume and love of gay colors that renders the
darky such good artistic material for one who has the skill."16