Sidney Hall with Lilly and Patti Tyson

Thomas Waterman Wood depicted Sidney Hall (ca. 1835—1920), a professional member of Baltimore’s free black community, engaged in a tea party with the children of her employer, the Ellicott Tysons, one of the city’s most prominent Quaker abolitionist families. Completed during his tenure in Maryland from his native Vermont, Wood acknowledged Baltimore’s complicated social history—it held the largest population of free blacks in the country in a state where enslavement remained legal.