Painting of Edge Hill
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.