Description
The source of this painting is a portrait of a young girl by Hugh Mangum, a young portrait photographer working in the Jim Crow South between the 1890s and early 1920s, known for welcoming Black and white clients into his studio with unusual openness for the era. He died young and unexpectedly in 1922, leaving behind hundreds of glass plate negatives stored in a family barn. Decades later, in 1968, the barn was slated for demolition, and the long‑forgotten negatives were discovered inside. The rescued plates were preserved and digitized, revealing images of people who had been hidden for half a century. The girl in the photograph on which this oil painting is based likely never received it and did not know why. Mr. Magnum's negatives are among the few sources of images of Black Americans in the early Jim Crow Era.
