Darktown bicycling-scooped de pear – Historic Reproduction
![Darktown bicycling-scooped de pear, [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1897. — antique lithograph](https://images.jameslantos.com/img/60/601132fbd45f-L.webp)
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
This antique lithograph of Darktown bicycling-scooped de pear brings a moment of history to your wall. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.
Order it framed and ready to hang, or unframed to match a frame you already love. Perfect for a home, office, library or classroom wall, and a gift with a story behind it. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Snapshots of the Past has been bringing history to the wall since 2001, for tens of thousands of customers worldwide.
Darktown bicycling-scooped de pear
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The title, "Darktown Bicycling: Scooped de Pear," shows the print's central joke: it mocks a Black cyclist through a phonetic rendering of dialect. The Darktown series, issued by Currier & Ives in the 1890s, relied on exaggerated features and dialect to portray African Americans as comic and inept, a racist convention that circulated widely in popular prints. The bicycle craze of that decade, when cycling spread quickly among the middle class, gave these artists a fresh subject for ridicule. Today the lithograph is most useful as evidence of how racial stereotypes were packaged as entertainment.
| Created / published | [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1897. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : lithograph. |
| Genre | c1983 |
| Notes | Caricature issued as part of the Darktown comics" series. Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 1,057 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-112343 |
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