From farmers cutting hay with scythes to dancers jigging to fiddle music on barn floors, artist William Sidney Mount’s paintings reveal a seldom recognized world on the North Shore of Long Island. At a time when racist caricatures were the norm, Mount portrayed people of color in his mid-nineteenth-century works with great humanity. The subjects who posed for Mount include Rachel the eel spearer, Henry Brazier the left-handed fiddler, George Freeman the jaunty banjo player and other agricultural laborers, domestic workers and musicians. Authors Katherine Kirkpatrick and Vivian Nicholson-Mueller honor by name the once anonymous Black and mixed-race models depicted in Long Island artist William Sidney Mount’s internationally renowned paintings.
Katherine Kirkpatrick is a painter and writer who has authored eight fiction and nonfiction books. Katherine studied English and art history at Smith College. She brings to this project her knowledge and enthusiasm for writing, art, William Sidney Mount and Three Villages History—passions instilled in her by her late mother, Audrey Kirkpatrick. Vivian Nicholson-Mueller is an educator and historian who has done extensive research on precolonial, colonial and postcolonial peoples of Long Island. Vivian, along with her cousin Simira Tobias, spearheaded the campaign to place Stony Brook’s Old Bethel Cemetery, established in the mid-nineteenth century by free people of color, on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. Vivian is descended from free Black, Black-Native and Black-White individuals from Setauket and shares ancestors with William Sidney Mount.