Hannah's Book Cover
Book cover of Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
Vintage Books, a division of Random House, has chosen to reproduce a detail from Hannah Amidst The Vines, by Eastman Johnson, on the cover of their forthcoming paperback reissue of Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 classic Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, the first novel by an African American woman; with a new preface, an introduction, and notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Prof. Gates is W.E.B. Du Bois Professorof the Humanities, Chair of Afro-American Studies, and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University; and one of Time magazine's "Twenty-Five Most Influential Americans" in 1997. This important painting from the Georgetown University Art Collection came to the publishers' attention through its inclusion in the exhibit Eastman Johnson: Painting America, organized by the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.
One of the preeminent masters
of nineteenth-century U.S. genre, Eastman Johnson travelled to Germany
to attend the popular Dusseldorf Akademie, and spent three years in The
Hague carefully studying the composition and color of the seventeenth-century
Netherlandish masters. Having previously mastered the skill of charcoal
portraiture, he changed his subject matter after his return from Europe
to traditional U.S. themes. His multi-figure scene, Old Kentucky Home
- Life in the South (1859), for which he was elected to the prestigious
National Academy of Design, inaugurated a series on rural southern African
Americans. The Georgetown painting depicts a charming young girl in a
naturalistic pose, leaning on a fence in an arbor with a string of grapes
suspended from her mouth.