La Vieille Plantation

This watercolor was made on a South Carolina plantation around 1785, and it is one of the only images from its time to show enslaved African Americans on their own, absorbed in one another rather than at work. A group dances to a plucked gourd instrument and a drum, both of West African type, in clothing and poses that scholars have traced to particular African traditions carried across the Atlantic. For nearly two centuries no one knew who had painted it. In 2010 a researcher at Colonial Williamsburg matched it to John Rose, a Beaufort County planter who himself held people in slavery. What the dancers are actually doing, and for whom, is still argued over today.