Museum accessions.(Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina)

The Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, began collecting southern art in the early 1980s, well before most museums and private collectors began to focus on paintings and other works of art created outside the major style centers. As a result, its holdings by artists who lived or worked in the American South or who portrayed aspects of southern history or culture are unusually rich, ranging from eighteenth-century portraits to Jasper Johns's Bushbaby of 2004. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has a particularly strong collection of works by African-American artists or depicting the black experience in the South, subsections that have recently been enhanced by several new additions.

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The earliest is View of Asheville, North Carolina, by Robert S. Duncanson (illustrated above), the first black American painter to gain an international reputation. Before that happened, in August 1850, he made a sketching trip to the Asheville region; the Asheville Messenger reported: "Mr. Duncanson appears to be a fine artist, and has shown us a number of very pretty sketches.... Certainly no part of America presents more, nor a greater variety of beauty than Western North Carolina, and we are proud that artists are beginning to appreciate it." The painting illustrated, one of only two known to survive from the trip, was owned originally by James W. Patton, a successful merchant, hotel owner, railroad promoter, and land investor in Asheville, who may have felt it provided proof of the region's emerging status. It remained in Patton's family until acquired by the museum.

The Family (illustrated at right) was painted by John Adams Elder, who was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and studied with Emanuel Leutze in Dusseldorf before the Civil War. During the war he fought under Brigadier General William Mahone, who led Confederate troops at the Battle of the Crater outside Petersburg, Virginia, and who ...