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Accession #	32.825
Artist	Thomas Hovenden
Title	I Know'd It Was Ripe
Date	ca. 1885
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	21 15/16 x 15 7/8 in. (55.7 x 40.3 cm)
Signed	Unsigned
Credit Line	Gift of the executors of the Estate of Colonel Michael Friedsam
Location	Visible Storage: Case 16, Screen B (Paintings)

Curatorial Remarks: I Know’d It Was Ripe is one of a number of single-figure compositions of African Americans completed by the Paris-trained Thomas Hovenden during the early to mid-1880s. These works and their titles appear highly stereotypical to the contemporary viewer, although there is little doubt that Hovenden was sympathetic to blacks, given his marriage in 1881 to Helen Corson, the daughter of activist Quaker abolitionists whose farm had been an antislavery meeting place and a stop on the Underground Railroad. In the larger social framework of the period, however, this painting and others like it contributed to the trivialization of the lives of freed blacks.