Activating genre painting. James Clonney and his painting Fishing Party on Long Island Sound off New Rochelle (1847)

In the context of the decolonial-oriented programme devised in recent years, the museum is presenting a lecture by art historian Alba Campo Rosillo focused on the painting Fishing Party on Long Island Sound off New Rochelle (1847) by James Goodwyn Clonney in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. 

In a seemingly peaceful fishing scene in New Rochelle, New York, three men are gathered in a boat. There are essential differences beyond their body language and attitudes. Most significantly, the elderly man and the boy are white, while the other man is Black. The old man's angry expression as he stares at the Black man creates one of the visual jokes present in this painting, since the Black man, considered by many at the time to be merely a tool of labour, is inactive rather than participating in the fishing. ;

Painted in 1847, the canvas combines a series of strategies that ensured its success in the saturated market for genre painting. It alludes to its context of profound national turmoil: the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Mexican-American War that began in 1846, and the growing debate over the expansion of slavery into the new territories. 

A key element that Clonney added to the interpretive mix was the allusion to the logic of the “blackface” minstrel, which activates the humour in the scene through a play of similes and opposites. Overall, the work offers a questioning of the major socio-political issues of its time, such as slavery and racism, and a speculation on how they will evolve.

Alba Campo Rosillo has a PhD in Art History from the University of Delaware, has taught at the University of Illinois, the University of Delaware, Saint Louis University (Madrid Campus) and Schiller International University in Madrid. She is currently a professor at the Universidad Nebrija in Madrid. Dr Campo Rosillo has also collaborated on the organisation and development of various exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Delaware Art Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art. At the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza she co-curated the exhibitions American Art in the Thyssen Collection and Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections. She has been awarded prestigious scholarships and research grants, including a CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts) fellowship from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, and a research grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.