Vale of Kashmir (1867): Art, History and Details

Vale of Kashmir (1867) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Robert S. Duncanson (American, 1821–1872).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Cincinnati-based Duncanson was the first African American artist to achieve recognition both nationally and abroad. This panoramic painting, one of his grandest, was inspired by an episode in Thomas Moore’s then-popular epic poem, Lalla-Rookh (1817), which describes a Persian princess’s journey to the Indian subcontinent to be married. In Duncanson’s conception, members of a courtly entourage depart a quasi-Islamic palace, arriving by boat onto a scrim of land where they ascend a monumental staircase to a plaza with a fountain spraying an impressive plume of water. Despite these substantial storytelling details, the human elements remain subordinate to the overwhelming splendor of the natural landscape in and of itself.

Object facts

• Title: Vale of Kashmir
• Date: 1867
• Creator attribution: Robert S. Duncanson (American, 1821–1872)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 94.9 x 154.6 x 12.1 cm (37 3/8 x 60 7/8 x 4 3/4 in.); Unframed: 73 x 132.4 cm (28 3/4 x 52 1/8 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2014.12

A detail from the museum

During the Civil War, Duncanson relocated to Montreal, where he inspired several Canadian landscape painters.

Collection credit

Sundry Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Robert S. Duncanson: A Centennial Exhibition. Cincinnati, OH : Cincinnati Art Museum, 1972.
• Cederholm, Theresa Dickason. Afro-American Artists; a Bio-Bibliographical Directory. Boston, MA: Trustees of the Boston Public Library, 1973.
• Manoogian, Richard A. American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.