Banjo Player
Charles Ethan Porter American
“Banjo Player,” a delicately rendered study of a Black man in a domestic interior singing and playing the popular instrument, is among the most distinctive for Porter. Introduced to the Americas in the eighteenth century by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean—with roots in West African musical traditions—the banjo was frequently associated with Black subjects. In the late nineteenth century, however, it found favor with middle- and upper-class White women, moving into Victorian parlors. Porter’s choice of the subject reveals his market savvy, as he searched for his own artistic style and cultural identity with a range of genres.
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