This painting- Landscape with Rainbow was created by Robert Seldon Duncanson in 1859. He was an American landscape artist of European and African ancestry who created renowned landscape paintings. Duncanson favored the sweeping, idealized large landscapes that earlier painters had popularized a generation ago. The canvas shows a couple walking across open pastureland while cattle drift toward a cottage beneath an arcing rainbow. The painting is almost a storybook scene rendered with close attention to atmospheric light. The setting plays an important role to the meaning. The scene is tied to the Ohio River valley near Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky. Duncanson would have known this terrain intimately as a free Black man living just across the water from slaveholding land. That geography then gives the rainbow added weight- due to the Underground Railroad routes running through this stretch of river, the arc pointing toward a lit cottage has been interpreted less as pastoral decoration and more as a quiet gesture toward hope and refuge. Duncanson painted this on the eve of civil war and its calm, harmonious tone reads, in hindsight, as wishful. Depicting a vision of peaceful coexistence the country was about to lose for years. Audiences also responded warmly, calling it among the finest landscapes produced anywhere west of the Alleghaenies. This praise helped Duncanson gain regional standing before his international reputation took shape. The painting's profile rose sharply recently. It was selected to hang behind at the 2021 presidential inauguration. Chosen because Duncanson's mixed heritage and the painting's hopeful imagery spoke to that year's themes of unity.
The palette favours muted tones of lavender, gold and green with meticulous attention to light and cloud formation which is suggests the typical formation of the genre’s emphasis on sublime and the pastoral.
