Analyzing Racial Undertones in Mount's 'The Power of Music'

The Power of Music, is nearly gold in an oil on canvas form, created by William Sidney Mount in 1847. The painting is very intriguing, the time this was made greatly influences the potency of its message. Being painted in the 1840’s I associate this painting with the idea of very strong racism at the time, and it makes me question why is it that a white man painted this picture of a black man being the main focus of the picture because analyzing it well, it seems as if the emphasis goes on the black man, rather than the white people in what seems to be the foreground. Also, I noticed that the light is focused on the black man while the white men are in a much darker place which makes one question why it is that this painter chose to do this.

Being that the United States in this century developed into a very diverse melting pot of races from all around the world and how they came together to develop o cultural revolution. During the Jacksonian era there was high inputs of immigration into the United States which “allowed for multiethnic groups to develop” (page 40). After there being several races there was always that racism present and showing them that Interaction should not be something that should be feared and this led to the revolutionary paintings from William Sidney Mount which typically depict diversity of cultures or races with an emphasis on music. Christopher J. Smith claims that through William Sidney Mount, blackface minstrelsy became what it came to be in the mid-19th century. So blackface minstrelsy was very common in the 19th century which was basically a form of entertainment through comic books, plays, or writings which consisted of white people dressing as black people to play their part because they were not allowed to be actors or write anything that they wanted. This is how Sidney’s work is interpreted, the people are not painted in order to spark the blackface minstrelsy he began to paint from different or unpopular perspectives of certain races, mostly people of color. After a few paintings the minstrelsy developed which could have been anything from walking cows and picking up cow manure, to mocking the African American race in order to seem like better people, or in order to have superiority over the black people. Although this was probably meant to mock the black race, it most likely had a positive impact in the aspect that it felt a bit more common to see