Plantation banjo player – Historic Print
(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 Plantation banjo player brings a moment of history to your wall. The original is held by the Library of Congress, so what you hang is a true record of its time.
Choose the framed print, ready to hang the day it arrives, or the unframed print for a frame of your own. Perfect for a home, office, library or classroom wall, and a gift with a story behind it. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Since 2001, Snapshots of the Past has shipped historic prints to tens of thousands of customers around the world.
Plantation banjo player
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The banjo is the object at the center of this color lithograph, and the title places its player on a plantation, a setting that 1870s printmakers returned to again and again. Prints like this belonged to a commercial genre of ethnic stereotypes, which borrowed from the minstrel show's comic Black characters and sold to audiences who enjoyed them as entertainment. The banjo had become a popular instrument in American music after the Civil War, and printmakers exploited its association with Black musicians to turn both the instrument and its player into a joke. Today such images are best read as evidence of how white audiences were taught to see African American people, not as accurate pictures of Black life.
| Created / published | c1875. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : lithograph, color. |
| Genre | Ethnic stereotypes 1870-1880.Lithographs Color 1870-1880. |
| Subjects | Banjos--1870-1880. African Americans--Music--1870-1880. |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,135 × 1,440 px · prints to 4 × 5 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-216905 |
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