Uncle Tiff

Uncle Tiff is one of the exceedingly few works known to survive by the African American sculptor, Eugène Warburg (ca.1825/1826–1859). The scholar Paul H. D. Kaplan has recently written on Warburg and notes that Uncle Tiff “may well have been the first African American sculptural subject by an African American artist” and is certainly “one of the very few pre-Civil War visual images in any medium both by and of an African American.” This sculptural group is also an example of Warburg’s career working in Europe, cut short by his untimely death, and his engagement with one of the leading British ceramic manufacturers of the 19th century, Copeland.

Warburg was born enslaved in New Orleans in late 1825 or early 1826, the son of Daniel Warburg (1789–1860), a German-Jewish emigrant, and Marie-Rose Blondeau (ca. 1804–1837?), a mixed-race enslaved woman who came to Louisiana from Santiago, Cuba, and possibly Haiti before that. Eugène Warburg was freed by his father at the age of four and trained as a stone cutter and sculptor in New Orleans in his youth. He set up a shop as a marble cutter in 1849 and likely created funerary monuments and sculptural work, but the only extant project that is firmly documented as being done by him is the black and white marble pavement of the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans.

In late 1852 Warburg traveled to Europe and settled in Paris. Here he studied for a short period with the respected French sculptor François Jouffroy (1806–1882) and was connected to a group of United States diplomats as well as other Americans assembling there for the second major world’s fair, the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Warburg showed four works at this international exhibition, which also acted as the Salon exhibition for 1855. These included a bust of John Young Mason of Virginia, the United States Minister to France. This bust, now preserved in the collection of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture (acc. no. 1927.21), is the only other sculptural work by Warburg known to survive.

Warburg’s work exhibited at the Exposition Universelle attracted positive notice but a relatively small amount, much of it in the American press. However, even before this, in May 1855, the artist was visited by Harriet Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, the Duchess of Sutherland (1806–1868), at his Paris studio. Sutherland was a wealthy and influential English aristocrat and a close friend of Queen Victoria. It is likely this meeting led Warburg to move to London in 1856. Here he received support from the Duchess of Sutherland and her friends Anne Isabella, Lady Byron (1792–1860), an educational reformer and philanthropist, and American author Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896). All three were staunchly opposed to slavery and were actively supporting the fight against it in the United States.

While in England Warburg made contact with the leading ceramic manufacturer W. T. Copeland. This was likely facilitated by the Duchess of Sutherland, as one of the Sutherland estates, Trentham, was adjacent to the Copeland factory located in Stoke-upon-Trent, Staffordshire. One of Britain’s ceramic innovations in the middle of the 19th century was the large-scale production of unglazed porcelain busts and figural groups. Parian ware, as it was known, was named after the Greek island Paros, which was renowned for its fine-grained white marble. Factory production in parian ceramic bodies made small-scale sculptural works affordable to a much wider swath of the middle classes. Copeland was one of the leading producers of parian, or “statuary porcelain” as the company called it, having huge success in this medium and introduced several hundred models in the material between the 1840s and the early 20th century.

For Copeland Warburg modeled a portrayal of Tiff, an enslaved African American man who was an important character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second novel “Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.” This book was published in 1856, the same year that the figure was modeled, and like her first novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” its story is set in the southern United States and contains strong anti-slavery themes. While Dred enjoyed strong initial sales, it did not enjoy long-term success or critical acclaim. Warburg work portrays one of the primary characters from the novel, Tiff, who was enslaved to a poor white family consisting of an ill mother and two young children, one of which, a boy named Teddy, sits on Tiff’s lap, in the figural group. While Warburg’s portrayal of Tiff is inspired by Stowe’s prose, he has rendered a much less caricatured image of this character, who Stowe begins her description of as follows: “His countenance presented, physically, one of the most uncomely specimens of negro features; and would have been positively frightful, had it not been redeemed by an expression of cheerful kindness which beamed from it.” While remaining true to Stowe’s description of Tiff’s worn clothes and details like the character working on darning a sock, Warburg has sensitively modeled a mature African American man with a sense of dignity. The attitude of care with which the Tiff figure encompasses Teddy on his lap also seems to synthesize the story which Stowe elaborated for Tiff, who comes to fill the parental role for the two children in his care after their mother died in the novel.

The Uncle Tiff figure group did attract the notice of the influential London-based Art Journal, which in September 1857 highlighted it as a “statuette of much merit and considerable interest” and asserted that this “striking work…cannot fail to find favour.” The publication also noted that Stowe had praised Warburg’s sculpture as “beautifully truthful.”

After a short time in London, Warburg traveled to Italy and settled in Rome to pursue his artistic career, like many American sculptors of this period did. He died there at age 33 or 34 in 1859.

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Provenance

Provenance (from the French provenir, 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object. Learn more about provenance at the Walters.

Private collection, Oxfordshire, England, [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; sale, Churchill Auctions Ltd., Didcot, Oxfordshire, England, 9 April 2024, lot 1768; purchased by the Walters Art Museum, 2024.