Old Kentucky Home Life In The South Analysis

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This paper will talk about three different interpretations of the art piece "Old Kentucky Home, Life in the South" by Eastman Johnson. To prove that, urban and rural scenes will be discussed along with the ethnic community described. This art piece has many themes with the piece, some having to do with people, place, and historical events such as the civil war. According to many authors, Eastman Johnson was one of the most successful painters in the 19th Century. His career got started by drawing self portraits using crayons and pencil. His best known pieces were Sentimental Victorian genre pictures. The Life in the South piece was an ambiguous ante vellum mixture of social commentary and unquestioning acceptance. Once education was offered …show more content…
This outside area taking place in the scene is considered to be a "room in which the blacks are gathered in a tenement, but it is nonetheless a home that incorporates virtually every available trope of family life: courtship and marriage, motherhood, training the youth and listening to the old. The white visitor in the right corner is marginalized. This patient depicts a black man playing his banjo and a white audience listening in from the outside. Even though the scene is urban, it is connecting buildings yet the "Negro Life at the South" which cued the viewers to see the tenements outbuilding on a plantation. A question is brought up about the man playing the banjo and if he is playing fast tune to which the boy is dancing, or if its a slow love song, which envelops the courting of the couple to the left. It was said that the truth about slave life in the nations capital was too difficult for most viewers to witness." During this period of history, "The country reached its first maturity, artists forcefully and critically created images that would bring audiences from all over together to enjoy sensation the allows them to see themselves in others." Not as seeing slavery as a sort of depression but coming together as a

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