The Freedman

Discussion

FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

In the fall of 1862, shortly after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, John Quincy Adams Ward began modeling The Freedman . A supporter of abolitionism, the sculptor employed a classically inspired vocabulary to sensitively portray a Black male figure, a broken shackle on his wrist. With his right hand steadied on a tree stump behind him, the man twists his torso, the energy of his position suggesting that he is about to stand. Ward harmonized neoclassicism with a renewed attention to realism. Here, he modeled the figure from life, transposing the particularities of an individual sitter to a subject both idealized and moralistic in tone.

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