This small 19th-century oil portrait depicts an African-American woman seated before a warm brown wall with hints of a cloudy sky in the distance. Seated in right profile, she turns to look at us with calm, alert eyes. Her tight, curly dark black hair is smoothed close to her head in short curls at the temples. She wears a dark dress with a V-shaped, almost ruched bodice and a crisp white collar edged with lace; a pale gray fichu peeks beneath. A striped red upholstered chair back arcs behind her. Soft light models her forehead and cheek, giving an intimate clarity. Early in his career (likely 1825–33), the Irish-born, Charleston-raised American painter James Hamilton Shegogue made a small oil portrait of an unnamed African-American woman. The work survived in a velvet traveling case with a family note which used now-offensive period language: “Colored slave - whom my Grandfather James Hamilton Shegogue - the artist, raised and of whom they were all very fond - he painted this portrait.” The Morris Museum of Art teaches that Shegogue, later a successful New York portraitist who traveled for commissions, is said to have carried this miniature with him. Those traces point to a personal likeness, probably of someone connected to the Shegogue household, cherished enough to accompany the artist on the road. In the South before Emancipation, formal portraits of Black sitters were uncommon; this picture’s intimate scale and attentive finish counter the era’s visual silence by presenting an individualized presence rather than a "type." Today, in the Morris Museum’s 19th-century portraits gallery, the panel invites viewers to ask who she was, why she was portrayed, and how affection, duty, and power intersected in the enslaved world this image quietly records.

Untitled (Portrait of African-American Woman) by James Hamilton Shegogue (American) - Oil on panel / c. 1825-1833 - Morris Museum of Art (Augusta, Georgia) #WomenInArt #artwork #PortraitofaWoman #art #artText #JamesHamiltonShegogue #JamesShegogue #Shegogue #AmericanArt #MorrisMuseumofArt #TheMorris

American artist Gari Melchers painted Marie (West Indian) around 1925, during a trip to the West Indies. The subject of the painting, whom Melchers called "Ma Petite," was one of the painter's favorite models. The impressionistic portrait depicts a mature dark-skinned West Indian woman (Marie) standing against a green and brown background. She wears a white knee-length dress and a white kerchief on her head. She leans against a tree. The artist's signature appears in the lower right corner. Julius Garibaldi (Gari) Melchers was a distinguished late-19th and early-20th-century artist whose work was well known in Europe and the United States as a leading American proponent of naturalism. He spent the majority of his career as an expatriate in Europe to great acclaim, but did accept commissions that brought him to the U.S. for prolonged periods. His marriage to Corinne Lawton Mackall of Savannah, Georgia led to a connection with that city’s Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences (later Telfair Museums). There he assumed a role in acquiring more than seventy paintings for the museum’s permanent collection. Melchers is known for his paintings of everyday Dutch life and religious scenes; impressionistic landscapes, murals, and portraits. During the final decade of his life, Melchers executed murals for the Detroit Public Library and the Missouri State Capitol. Numerous solo exhibitions of his work were held, including one at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, which opened just before the artist died on November 30, 1932. After his death, in an era of modernist abstraction and a new, vital realism, his stylistically conservative paintings were viewed by many as old-fashioned. Today his paintings are found in numerous collections and museums throughout the country

“Marie (West Indian)” by Gari Melchers (American) - Gouache on paper / c. 1925 - Morris Museum of Art (Augusta, Georgia) #womeninart #art #oilpainting #MorrisMuseumofArt #GariMelchers #womensart #Melchers #AmericanArt #AmericanArtist #portraitofawoman #gouache #gouacheart #artwork #fineart #bskyart