‘After the Sale: Slaves going South’ by Eyre Crowe (1853)
‘Richmond’, sketch by Eyre Crowe, 1853, published in ‘With Thackeray in America’ (1893)
Medium: oil
Exhibited: Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street Gallery, London, 1854; ‘To Be Sold: Virginia and the American Slave Trade’, Library of Virginia, 2014
Current owner: Chicago History Museum
Crowe was struck in Richmond, Virginia, by the scenes after the slave sales, when enslaved people were ‘marched under escort of their new owners across the town to the railway station on 8th Street, where they took places, and “went South”. They held scanty bundles of clothing, their only possession. These were the scenes which in a very short number of years made one realise the sources of the fiercest of civil wars’ (With Thackeray in America, p. 136).
This painting was exhibited at the Suffolk Street Gallery in London in March 1854, and was described by the critic in the Art Journal in June 1864 (‘British Artists: their Style and Character – No. LXXIII – Eyre Crowe’, pp 206) as ‘full of life and bustle, but not of the kind that is pleasant to look upon’.
It appears in the journal American Heritage, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 1967.
It features in the online exhibition ‘To Be Sold: Virginia and the American Slave Trade‘. Credits: Maurie D. McInnis, curator, with contributions by Barbara C. Batson, Gregory Crawford, and Gregg D. Kimball
Eyre Crowe (1824-1910) 