Author Description

With the formation of the United States came the need for visual images that would embody the spirit of individuality and the distinctive character of the American experiment in democracy. The prints, photographs, illustrations, and drawings in Graphic Arts & the South recreate those images, introducing the reader to the special lore of the southern part of the nation - its mysteries, its pain, and its continuing struggle to evolve. Many nineteenth-century prints and illustrations depict a South that never existed, yet these images dominated the media and took on the semblance of reality as white Southerners assimilated the myth. As Sue Rainey points out in "Images of the South in Picturesque America and The Great South": The wood engravings... were based on on-the-spot drawings; the artist's direct confrontation with his subject matter lends an immediacy to the illustrations and a sense that these are truthful representations. Yet,...each series was made up of carefully selected and shaped depictions of the post-war South, corresponding to the intentions of the authors and the publishers and the preferences of the artists. And there was much they chose not to record. From David Tatham's "The Half Horse-Half Alligator and Other Southern Members of the Jacksonian Bestiary" to Jessie Poesch's "David Hunter Strother: Mountain People, Mountain Images," this collection of essays and graphic arts gives shape and definition to the history and legacy of the Old South.