Locating Black Freedom in Thomas Waterman Wood's Baltimore Paintings

In the early nineteenth century and increasingly after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, free-born and freed people of African descent risked kidnapping and (re)enslavement when moving beyond the urban neighborhoods in which they were known. Freedom often hinged, in other words, on a relationship between place and recognition. In the city of Baltimore, navigating these perils meant contending with the city's complex system of enslaved, indentured, and free wage-earning laborers who often lived and worked alongside one another. Amid the urgency of freedom's visible recognition in this period, Thomas Waterman Wood produced two pendant portraits of African Americans at work on the streets of Baltimore—"Moses, The Baltimore News Vendor" and "Market Woman"—one depicting a well-known free man, Moses Small, and the other an anonymous woman whose status remains ambiguous. Both stand on a cobblestone street against a vague, dark background, with no markers of a specific location within the city. As reminiscent of the generic black urban dwellers in "cries" and street views as individual representations, Wood's paintings have been viewed as walking a thin line between portraiture and genre scenes. This talk explores the stakes of such a categorical confusion for depicting Small and the market woman, probing the confluence of anonymity and identifiability, of a specific urban setting and locationlessness present within them and at work in the larger urban visual culture of which they are a part.