For Lawrence, the Haitian peasantry’s struggle for freedom in the eighteenth-century had thematic resonances for the long-term struggles for freedom of black women and men in the United States. In a succession of serial paintings he made after the Toussaint L’Ouverture series, Lawrence brought this domestic concern for individual and collective struggle into a unique, African-American perspective. Starting with his Frederick Douglass series of 1938-39, Lawrence embraced the range of experiences, trials, dilemmas, and triumphs of selected personalities in African-American history, providing viewers with an extra-literary sense and feeling for these important people and episodes. For example, in several of the panels from his Harriet Tubman series of 1939-40, a strict, illustrative rendering of this nineteenth-century tale about a woman shepherding fellow bondsmen from slavery into freedom is supplanted by an expressive, sometimes dreamlike conceptualization of her true story. At times more a symbolist than a social realist, Lawrence bypassed superficial features of the events and figures in Harriet Tubman’s story, searching instead for the inner, emotional truths of her heroism.
Jacob Lawrence (for the Rizzoli Art Series), New York: Rizzoli International Publ., Inc., 1992.
