MS01.01.03.B02.F10.029

[crossed-out: -20-] 25
managed to confine his sketching and painting experiences during this period
to far away places such as Vermont and Minnesota , see figure (VALLEY OF LAKE PEPIN, MINNESOTA), thus escaping a real physical sight of the war at hand.
In 1863, Duncanson returned to Europe again sponsored by the Anti-Slavery League spending several years in Scotland, the birthplace of his father. There he exhibited: "The Lotos Eaters" and met the Duchess of Sutherland and received praise in the LondonArt Journal from an English critic who characterized Duncanson's art as being favorably equal to any landscape artist's in England.
Of this painting the critic wrote:

" The Land of the Lotos Eaters; America has long maintained
supremacy in landscape art, perhaps indeed its landscape
artists surpass those of England. Certainly we have no painter
who can equal Church, we are not exaggerating if we affirm that
the production under notice may compete with any of the modern
British Schools Duncanson has established high fame in the
United States and in Canada" 22

Earlier praise for Duncaanson's talent as a major American artist comes from this account of the high esteem in which he was held by a leading critic of the CINCINNATI GAZETTE:

"Mr. Duncason has long enjoyed the enviable reputation of being the best landscape
painter in the West, and his latest effort cannot fail to raise him still higher in the
estimation of the art loving public. He has not only wooed but won his favorite muse,
and now finds ample repayment for his labor of a lifetime, in the achievement of a
more brilliant success than has attended most of his co-peers..." 23

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22 Lonron Art Journal, January 1, 1886.
23 The Cincinnati Gazette, May 30, 1861.