“The Book of Two Hemispheres” highlights the dynamic visual culture that arose in response to the most famous American anti-slavery novel of its era and arguably of all time: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. A wide array of imagery in different media, produced both in the United States and Europe, testifies to the book’s powerful impact and to Stowe’s own international celebrity. Yet, these pictorial responses also reveal conflicting ideologies pertaining to racial difference, ideals of liberty, and Christian doctrine, which sometimes failed to translate across social and cultural contexts. Since its publication in 1852, Stowe’s passionate condemnation of slavery has polarized audiences. The novel received both strong support and strong criticism in its own time, was condemned by authors and activists in the mid-twentieth century, and has undergone reevaluation by scholars in the twenty-first. This exhibition probes the volume’s complicated legacy, examining how the text and the visual interpretations it inspired reshaped conceptions of chattel slavery in the United States for publics on both sides of the Atlantic.

Image Credit:

Relief depicting scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ca. 1870s, marble by Lot Torelli. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Laura T. and John H. Halford Jr. Art Acquisition Fund, 2022.26.1