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AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Keywords

women's studies, art history, portraiture

Abstract

The painting of Robert, Calvin, Martha, and William Scott, and Mila (known as The Children of Reverend William Anderson Scott) is not just a family heirloom or a portrayal of Reverend William Scott’s four children and their caretaker, Mila. On the contrary, nearly two hundred years after it was painted, The Children of Reverend Scott functions today as a historical document in that analysis of it records the contemporary roles and status of children, parents, and slaves in nineteenth-century Southern life. This paper explores the personal convictions of Reverend Scott as recorded in the portrait—namely his roles as a father, minister, and southern slave-owner—using his personal papers and historical records local to New Orleans and San Francisco for further context and evidence.

Biography

Madeline Duffy (from Yakima, Washington) is a senior studying interdisciplinary humanities emphasizing in history and minoring in Spanish. She currently works at the BYU Museum of Art as a student educator. Her research interests focus on the way art informs the study of history, and she is currently working on an analysis of Maya poetic structure as used in El Título de Totonicapán, a sixteenth-century K’iche’ legal document.

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