Chloe and Sam

After moving to Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, in 1881, Hovenden executed a series of paintings as a tribute to the town’s proud heritage of abolitionism. These paintings are artful inventions, with characters and scenes of the type Harriet Beecher Stowe made memorable in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In several of his works, Hovenden painted his neighbor Sam Jones, a free black man who had arrived in Plymouth Meeting in 1849. The name Chloe in the painting’s title perhaps refers to Stowe’s character Aunt Chloe, the strong black domesticwho represented the backbone of many
antebellum Southern households.