The first stark difference that stands out about the paintings certainly has to be the setting. Despite the fact that both paintings contain some form of a master and a slave, the setting certainly is different. Kuhn's painting is set on a balcony with a balustrade behind the child along with formal gardens and pavilions behind that are complete fictions. During that time period, no properties in America looked like this. Kuhn was meeting the illusory desire of Colonial gentry to seem like important extensions of European culture (Pohl 65).

The setting for Duncanson's painting is slightly more fitting for its time. The painting itself is a presentation of two of the characters, Uncle Tom and Eva, from the novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. The two characters are "...set in the foreground of a landscape that combines a luminous harbor scene with an overgrown arbor" (Pohl 200). Such landscape art was what Duncanson was renowned for, and also seems fitting since the master and slave are represented in a rural setting. Certainly, slavery was much more prominent in the rural South where plantations were the main source of economic prosperity.

This type of grandeur did not begin to be realized for another century or so, when Americans were actually able to accumulate wealth comparable to Europe. These types of "aristocratic pretensions" (Pohl 65) made it seem appropriate that there would also be a strict division of class during the time. With such a class difference, one can deduce that servitude or some form of slavery would also be accepted during the time period. This argument is validated by the fact that the slave population was growing dramatically during the first half of the 18th century when the number of slaves rose from 15,000 to 100,000 (Pohl 64).

Both paintings also seem to share an equal amount of depth. There is a background present in each of the pictures, however there seems to be a lot more attention to detail in the Kuhn painting. As a portrait artist, this makes sense because he would want to make detailed depictions for his employers. The garment of the child is a good example of this. There has been strong detail present in everything from the buttons on the coat, the gardens in the back, and even the buckles in the shoes. This goes to show that the aristocratic pretensions during the time were certainly reaffirmed in the artwork of the period. However, the Duncanson piece provides less detail. The characters are less defined, and seem to almost be a part of the natural scene. Duncanson seems to make a clear effort to make things work together, and show that all elements are from the same source. Duncanson creates a vantage point in which nature's elements of sun, sky, water, land, and foliage converge in a rugged landscape. Bringing the characters in such an environment shows that the humans are ret

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1556
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)