Frederick Douglass
[Writer, orator, activist, b. 1818, Talbot County, Maryland, d. 1895, Washington, D.C..]
Poets, prophets and reformers are all picture makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements.
What was once the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now the privilege of all. The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase fifty years ago.
Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists. It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features.
The whole soul of man is a sort of picture gallery, a grand panorama, in which all the great facts of the universe, in tracing things of time and things of eternity, are painted.
Handsome or homely, manly or mean, if an author’s face can possibly be other than fine looking the picture must be in the book, or the book be considered incomplete.
(1861, in a lecture called “Pictures and Progress”)
