Thomas Waterman Wood, in the company of William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham, is one of America's first artists to find the black man a suitable subject for portrait and genre painting and to portray the black with dignity. Spending several years in the South immediately preceding and during the War Between the States, Wood developed a sympathy for blacks and their dream of freedom. Significantly, Wood may have been the first white American painter to depict free blacks on contrast to the enslaved servants who had appeared as accessory figures in their masters' portraits as early as the eighteenth century.

Wood was born in Montpelier, Vermont, November 12, 1823. The family was not wealthy, and the young Wood was obliged ...