Raffling for a Goose (the Lucky Throw)

This lithograph was created from the Mount painting The Lucky Throw (currently unlocated), a work that received the only known published written comment about the artist from Walt Whitman, writing about it in the New York Evening Post on February 1, 1851:

I returned, the other day, after looking at Mount’s last work—I think his best—of a Long Island negro, the winner of a goose at a raffle…Mount’s negro may be said to have a character of Americanism…but I must be pardoned for saying that I never could, and never will admire the exemplifying of our national attributes with Ethiopian minstrelsy, or Yankee Hill characters upon the stage, as the best and highest we can do in that way.