Darktown opera-the serenade: Come lub come de moon am in de sky"" – Antique Wall Art
![Darktown opera-the serenade: Come lub come de moon am in de sky"", [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1886. — antique lithograph](https://images.jameslantos.com/img/a0/a0b8b3d0ea61-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
A window into the past: Darktown opera-the serenade: Come lub come de moon am in de sky"", preserved in this antique lithograph. It comes from the collections of the Library of Congress, scanned from the original and carefully restored.
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Darktown opera-the serenade: Come lub come de moon am in de sky""
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This lithograph takes its title from a mock-serenade, "Come lub come de moon am in de sky," staged as a "Darktown opera" in which the dialect spelling and the comic romance are the joke. Currier & Ives issued it in New York in 1886 as one of its Darktown comics, a series of racist caricatures that drew on the blackface minstrel stage and that were popular with the print trade of the 1880s. The series presented Black Americans as figures of ridicule, and the phonetic dialect in the title is part of that mockery. Viewers today read it as a record of how stereotypes were marketed to white audiences, not as an accurate picture of Black life.
| Created / published | [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1886. |
|---|---|
| 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 × 1,123 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-174328 |
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