“Lady, while you are young and beautiful, forget not the slave…”: The Album Art of Sarah Mapps Douglass and Sarah Louisa Forten

Around 1837, Sarah Mapps Douglass, a teacher and prominent member of Philadelphia’s free black elite, painted a lovely watercolor of a floral bouquet in the friendship album of Elizabeth Smith, a white abolitionist teenager with whom she taught Sunday school. Featuring a large pink rose blossom accented with a sprig of blue forget-me-nots and two specimens of the wild pansy popularly known as heart’s ease, the charming, seemingly innocuous composition initially strikes the viewer as little more than a conventional display of feminine accomplishment. However, beneath the image Douglass penned a powerful inscription whose clever puns dramatically transform the work into a political imperative: “Lady, while you are young and beautiful ‘Forget Not’ the slave, so shall ‘Heart’s Ease’ ever attend you.”

Paintings and drawings made by black women in nineteenth-century friendship albums represent the earliest signed artworks by African American women, and Elizabeth Smith’s album offers two of the most compelling examples: this work by Douglass and a stunning “remix” of abolitionist emblem and verse by Sarah Forten. Both artists created sophisticated visual/verbal texts that wed word and image to extraordinary effect, radically transforming popular discourses of genteel femininity and hackneyed antislavery tropes. They also provide a unique opportunity to consider how free black women involved in the interracial anti-slavery movement negotiated relationships with white peers, particularly with regard to the differences in how they performed their raced, gendered, and classed identities when these performances were addressed primarily to their white associates rather than to and for each other.