John Rose

The Old Plantation is a small watercolour of enslaved people gathered between two outbuildings beside a broad river, made around 1785 to 1795. A man plays an early gourd banjo, the earliest known painting to show one, while others dance with sticks and two women hold gourd rattles. Scholars trace the headdresses, instruments and dance to West Africa, and the scene shows enslaved people pursuing their own interests, a rare and credible record from the American mainland.

For decades nobody knew who painted it. In 2010 Susan P. Shames, a librarian at Colonial Williamsburg, published research identifying the artist as John Rose, a South Carolina planter and amateur painter. Rose was named clerk of a Beaufort District court in 1775, and by 1795 he owned 813 acres on the Coosaw River and held at least 50 enslaved people. The painting probably shows his plantation in what is now Beaufort County.

Rose was born around 1752 and died in Charleston in 1820. The watercolour passed to his son-in-law and stayed in the family until it was sold around 1928, and in 1935 it was bought for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, whose folk art collection in Williamsburg holds it today.