William Sidney Mount and Long Island People of Color

September 12, 2022
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William Sidney Mount (l) and The Bone Player (1856) featuring Andrew Brewster.
William Sidney Mount (l) and The Bone Player (1856) featuring Andrew Brewster.

William Sidney Mount was known for his keenly-observed portraits and scenes of everyday life on Long Island during the first half of the 19th century. He portrayed farmers, fiddlers, tradesmen, and workers in their natural haunts, laughing, singing, and enjoying life.

But if you look closely, Mount’s pictures portray more than rural idylls. Many of the people in his paintings were taken from real life, and many of them were people of color. Katherine Kirkpatrick and Vivian Nicholson-Mueller took a deep dive into these paintings and cross referenced them with Mount’s journals and contemporary records, maps, the federal census, and cemetery gravestones. What they found looking back at them were the lives of Mount’s models, people of Black and Native American ancestry like Mary Brewster, Robin Mills, and Henry Brazier.

On this episode, Katherine and Vivian discuss their research and how it helped illuminate the world of William Sidney Mount, 19th century genre painting, and – most important of all – the lives of local Setauket, Stony Brook, and Old Field residents who had been forgotten by history.

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