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Accession #	1999.54.1
Artist	George Augustus Baker Jr.
Title	Henry Ward Beecher
Date	1874
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	30 1/8 x 25 1/8in. (76.5 x 63.8cm)
Signed	Signed lower left: "G.A. Baker / 1874"
Credit Line	Gift of the American Art Council
Location	Visible Storage: Case 24, Screen K (Paintings)

Curatorial Remarks:

Henry Ward Beecher, the theatrical Congregationalist pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church and a powerful antislavery orator (and the brother of Hamet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), has been criticized by modern historians for convincing a wide national audience that abolition should be achieved gradually through the Christianization of African-American slaves, Despite his avoidance of radical abolitionist measures, his oratory nevertheless remained a powerful wartime force. He offered the following indictment of the complicity of New Yorkers in the practice of slavery: "We clothe ourselves with the cotton which the slave tills . . . It is you and I that wear the shirt and consume the luxury. Our looms and our factories are largely built on the slave's bones. We live on his labor."