The Quadroon

George Fuller

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This painting retains its original title, The Quadroon, which is a demeaning term for a person of one-quarter Black descent used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During an 1850 tour of the South, Massachusetts-born artist George Fuller witnessed a mixed-race woman being sold at auction in Augusta, Georgia. The woman left a strong impression upon Fuller, who wrote in a January 26 letter, "Who is this girl with eyes large and black? … She is under thy feet, white man. … Is she not your sister?" Fuller became a critical observer of Southern Black life in the 1850s, before taking a seventeen-year hiatus from art to care for his family after his father’s death. In 1876, he returned to painting full-time and created a series of Southern scenes, including this one. The depiction of the enigmatic woman, with large dark eyes that had captivated Fuller decades earlier, is inspired by French pastoral imagery if particularized in an American context. In the background, three figures toil in a field, evoking the harsh realities of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil War United States.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art