Thanks to your advocacy efforts on our behalf, we're happy to report that the recently passed Omnibus Spending Bill includes a very small increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities! While our work is not over with regards to the upcoming 2018 budget to be passed in the fall, the Omnibus Spending Bill represents an endorsement of the important work that the humanities do for our communities. These funds will continue to support our work of providing free access to authoritative content about Virginia's history and culture.
In this excerpt from a long, comprehensive, and unsigned review,
"Exhibition of the Royal Academy," published on June 1, 1861, London's Art-Journal declares Eyre Crowe's Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, "one of the most important pictures of the exhibition."
An artist, hitherto comparatively unknown, has produced one of
the most important pictures in the exhibition, and certainly the most promising work of the season, from among those that can be looked
on as the apparently coming men of English Art. The subject of Mr. E. Crowe's picture, No. 328, is 'Slaves waiting for Sale,
Richmond, Virginia,' and the appalling guilt of that accursed system was never more
successfully depicted, and all the more successfully, that its most hideous horrors,
even those of the auction mart, have been indicated rather than portrayed. What we
take to be a whole family sits there for sale, ranged along a seat, and all dressed
in their holiday attire. The look of settled sadness on the face of the mother, as
she nurses her baby, the low, unintellectual type of the boy, who sits beyond, the
expression of the elder girl, attempting to keep the temper of the younger child from
becoming fretful, and the look of suffused indignant scorn, mingled with defiance,
shown in the expression and bearing of the father, are powerful examples of a rare
power in Art—that of successfully and discriminately representing the inward
actuality and outward expression of phases of mental thought and human passion. This
success Mr. Crowe has undoubtedly achieved, and he has also achieved another,
although of mere secondary importance—the power of representing with facility and
fulness feelings which he comprehends with distinctness. In truth, this is the great
secret of successful development in any walk of mental labour. The cause of half the
failures among artists is their want of this clear-seeing of their own ideas. They
float like a dim haze through their minds, and what they cannot distinctly see with
their mind's eye, can never be rendered, through any medium of communication,
otherwise than as dully and hazy to others. In writing, no author will ever make
clear to others what his own mind does not clearly see and fully comprehend; and
artists are authors, who write with brushes instead of pens. This quality of
clear-sightedness Mr. Crowe has displayed in an eminent degree, not less in the
despicable character he has infused into these whipper-snapper, fire-eating,
soul-driving Yankees, than in the emotions so natural to the degraded victims of
their avarice and cruelty; and we leave this picture, with the confident expectation
that the artist, although hitherto all but unknown, is able, if he will it, to make
for himself a position in what Bacon called "the garden of great intellecta."
