Painting of Edge Hill

Place Made
New Hanover North Carolina United States of America
Date Made
1840-1860
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
HOA: 19 1/2″; WOA: 29 1/5″
Accession Number
6020
Description
This painting depicts Edge Hill outside of Wilmington, North Carolina.  Edge Hill was established in 1812 by Richard Bradley on sixty-five acres along Bradley’s Creek outside of Wilmington, North Carolina.  Bradley was a banker, merchant, and industrialist.  Edge Hill was one of a number of similarly sized estates outside of Wilmington that served as a “colony” of summer residences for the city’s elite families. 

By 1840 Edge Hill was occupied by William Giles, Jr. Unlike a previous generation, the Giles family appears to have used Edge Hill as their primary residence.  According to census records, Giles enslaved forty-eight people, twenty of whom were engaged in “manufacturing or trade” for his various business ventures.  As his business ventures in Wilmington and Savannah, Georgia, flourished, the number of people he enslaved increased. 

In 2018 Summer Institute student Kelli Gibson researched this painting. Her archival research revealed that some of those Giles enslaved were craftspeople, including carpenters and bricklayers.  Gibson also discovered that Giles took out insurance policies on twenty-nine of the people he enslaved.

Though ostensibly a portrait of the main house and its landscape of leisure, this view of Edge Hill illuminates aspects of the lives and labor that the family enslaved there.  By reading the painting against the historical record Gibson was able to identify the other buildings on the canvas.  Included in the “portrait” of the main house are the kitchen, stable, an overseers house, a water tower, and a bathing house.  Not only were many of these structures home to the enslaved, but they were almost certainly built and repaired by the skilled men and women Gibson identified in the documentary record. 

Pre-Civil War southern landscape paintings are exceedingly rare.  Painted on the eve of the Civil War, it is interesting to consider the (currently unknown) artist’s choice of light, color, and composition, and how these elements conspire to create an unsettling portrait of a place on the cusp of seismic change. 

Credit Line
Partial Gift of Mr. Thomas A. Gray and Thomas A. and Ann P. Gray MESDA Purchase Fund