Collection of Teresa Heinz. Eyre Crowe’s “Slaves Waiting for Sale” (1861) depicts the scene in a Virginia auction house.
Artists before the Civil War took personal risks when portraying slaves. Southerners did not want their more abusive practices to be professionally documented.
In 1853 the British painter Eyre Crowe sidled into a slave auction house on a side street in Richmond, Va., and started to sketch white bidders eyeing a row of neatly dressed children, women and men with traces of fear and anxiety on their impassive faces.
