MS01.01.03.B02.F10.027

23 [struck: 10]

the Beautiful". It seems fair to say that Duncanson not only idealized the land
but he also [struck: can be said to have] lyricized it with a romantic version which bordered on fantasy and at the same time
recorded a naturalistic truth about the word which would have tested the genius of the greatest craftsmen of his day.

During the years 1845-1859, Duncanson painted and worked in the cities of
Detroit and Cincinnati. He tried his hand earlier as a portrait artist and
this endeavor met with some success. But his portraits could by no stretch of
the imagination be considered [to be] his best work. He was commissioned by
noted families such as the Longworths and the Berthelets to render their likeness in large canvases that are still in the possession of their descendants and in several mid-western museums.

In 1848 Nicholas Longworth, a wealthy cincinnati lawyer, commissioned
Duncanson to do a series of "wall decorations" for his mansion called Belmont,
now the Taft Museum.16 [19?] These murals put Duncanson ahead in matters of contact
with able patrons of the arts. He then used these infleunces to enhance his own
studies in art outside the United States. But prior to his travel abroad he
rediscovered America just as Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson River
school had done. Between 1850 and 1853 Duncanson travelled to North Carolina
and Pennsylvania in search of landscape scenes that appealed to his sense of
design. [struck: and lyrical rendering that he alone seemed so capable of delivering in
painterly form. His now famous painting] Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami
River was executed during this period and shows a [struck: the] maturity of style and refinement
[struck: ness] of technique that had come about as a result of the serious study of

[line]
19 Porter, James A., Art in America, "Robert S. Duncanson, Midwestern Romantic-Realist", Vol. 39, No. 3, October, 1951, p. 110.