Artist
Samuel Jennings
Samuel Jennings is an American Folk Art painter. 1 work is cataloged here, principally at Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Samuel Jennings was a painter active in the late eighteenth century, associated with Philadelphia and London. He is remembered chiefly for Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, painted in 1792 for the Library Company of Philadelphia. The picture shows a personification of Liberty presenting books and instruments of learning to a group of African Americans, with broken chains nearby, making it one of the earliest American paintings to express an explicitly antislavery theme.
Jennings worked in an allegorical, Neoclassical idiom, and the commission ties his name to the abolitionist and Enlightenment circles of the early American republic.
Works by Samuel Jennings
Collections represented
Artists in a similar vein
