The Hunted Slaves. This item is unavailable.The Hunted Slaves

Carte-de-visite photograph after Andsell's painting. Printed title on verso, but otherwise unmarked mount. The photograph reproduces, in black-and-white, a painting by Richard Ansdell, completed in 1861, the first year of the Civil War. The dramatic image depicts two runaway slaves, a man and woman, defending themselves against a pack of hunting dogs (mastiffs). The man is shown in a heroic pose, with partly broken shackles visible on his left hand, wielding a hatchet in his right hand, defending himself and a women (who is behind him), against two attacking hunting dogs, and with a third dog on its back, seemingly dead. The African-American woman cowers behind the shirtless man, while a snake crawls over a small log, in the lower foreground. The painting became an iconic image in the American abolitionist movement, and it was reproduced widely. When first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861, the painting was accompanied by a quotation from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's abolitionist poem, 'The Dismal Swamp,' describing an escaped slave's desperate flight. A similar scene in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' where a slave is attacked by dogs, is believed by some to have been the artist's inspiration. Stowe had visited the artists hometown in 1853. The artist presented the painting to the local Cotton Relief Committee, to help support unemployed mill workers, who had lost their jobs during the Civil War (during which the Federal blockade of the Confederate ports prevented the export of cotton from the American south, affecting English cotton mills). The Committee raffled the painting raising the equivalent of £35,000. Carte-de-visite photograph after Andsell's painting. Printed title on verso, but otherwise unmarked mount.…