Artist Edward Lamson Henry (1841 - 1919)

Kept In

Date1889

DimensionsFramed: 18 1/2 × 22 3/4 × 2 1/2 in. (47 × 57.8 × 6.4 cm) Sight: 13 1/2 × 18 in. (34.3 × 45.7 cm)

Object numberN0309.1961

Credit LineCollection of the Fenimore Art Museum. Gift of Stephen C. Clark

Photograph by Richard Walker

Label TextIn the 1880s, Henry and his wife moved to the town of Cragsmoor, located in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, where he founded an artists’ colony. Cragsmoor attracted Henry because of its beauty and its quaint rural characters. He often sketched his neighbors at work and play and used them to add charm and realism to his pictures. The frequency with which the little girl in the red dress appears in Henry’s paintings, sketches, and watercolors suggests that he painted her from life and saw her regularly around town. In Kept In, Henry has positioned her as a lone figure sitting sorrowfully inside an empty schoolhouse while her classmates play outdoors. Clearly, the school is integrated, a choice that some New York school districts made. The child’s discarded textbook and slate, wistful but sullen expression, and worn attire divulge Henry’s nineteenth-century attitudes toward African Americans. Is he suggesting that she should be studying but has discarded her books? Is he suggesting that she was “kept in” because of bad behavior or poor schoolwork? Is he showing the social separation between those outdoors, one of whom appears to be African American, and the black child indoors? The answer to these questions is left to the viewer.
Exhibition History“The Black Image in American Art, 1750-1930,” Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., January 13 – March 26, 1990; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, April 20 – June 25, 1990.

“Reading, 'Riting, and Race: The Education of African-Americans in Prince George County,” Harmony Hall Regional Center, Fort Washington, MD, January 2 – February 28, 1998.

“American ABC: Childhood in 19th-Century America,” Stanford University Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, CA, January 2 – July 5, 2006; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C July 4 – September 17, 2006; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, November 1, 2006 – January 7, 2007.

“Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art,” Fenimore Art Museum, August, 23 – December 31, 2008; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN, January 25 – April 18, 2010.

“Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in Nineteenth Century American Art,” Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, September 12, 2012 – January 6, 2013; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN, February 16 – May 26, 2013; Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR, June 28 – September 30, 2013.

“Le Peinture Americaine: 1830-1900,” Fondation de l’Hermitage, Lausanne, June 6 – October 10, 2014.

On View

On view