Cincinnati from Covington, Kentucky

This topographically accurate view appears to have been painted by Robert S. Duncanson from a daguerre-otype photograph, known only through an engraved reproduction in Graham’s Magazine of 1848. Duncanson may have made the daguerreotype himself, but that has not been proven. The painting provides a marvelous sense of the city as experienced first hand. The sunshine tries to penetrate the smoke, which mingles with the humid atmosphere. In this painting, Duncanson commented on slavery in Kentucky, changing white figures in the earlier engraving to African Americans. Two white children talk to a slave, and near the cabin another slave hangs laundry on a line. Kentucky’s agricultural economy is contrasted sharply with the bustling industrial city across the river, where Duncanson was free to become a professional painter. Yet Cincinnati’s development had its costs; the manufacturing prowess of the Queen City, depicted in such detail in this painting, depended upon the South where slavery drove the economy.