"Winslow Homer's masterpiece, "A Visit from the Old Mistress," literally sparkles with life as it ignites the imagination.
The 1876 oil on canvas painting depicts a scene in which a refined white woman appears to be a step or two inside the austere abode of three black women. The exquisite subtleties of background shading are extraordinary, but it is the expressions on the faces of the women that so eloquently mirror the human emotions brought on by changing times and circumstances.

The painting is a cornerstone work in the exhibition

"Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art," on view at the University of Virginia Art Museum. The show, featuring more than 75 paintings, works on paper, photographs, mixed media and installation works, will be in place through April 20.

This is the first stop for the exhibit, which is curated by Angela D. Mack, deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C. Guest curator is Maurie D. McInnis, director of American Studies and associate professor of art history at UVa.

Mack and McInnis spent four years bringing the exhibit to reality. The Homer painting was considered such a vital part of the show that the opening was put off for nearly a year so that it could be included.

"Homer's painting normally hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, which has recently reopened in its renovated space," McInnis said one recent morning as she walked with a visitor through the exhibit, which will next go to the Gibbes Museum and then on to the Morris Museum in Augusta, Ga.

"They had made an agreement that for at least one year after the opening none of the works of art would be loaned. So we had to wait until that work had passed its year and was allowed to be loaned out.

"We were holding up the show, not only for that work - there were a couple others for which that was true as well - but that one was key. It really had to be in the show."

Homer's painting hangs in the foyer, where the exhibit begins. It provides a powerful first step on a journey through a landscape where past and present inextricably conjoin.

In her introduction, Mack quoted Katherine Manthorne, who wrote in a 2001 article that "the plantation is a distinctive New World institution, and as such it offers the Americanist an invaluable object of study."

The curator goes on to suggest that it's not simply the grandeur of the plantations that continues to intrigue. It's also their relationship to the "Southern antebellum culture; more specifically it is slavery."

"I think this exhibit gives us the opportunity to deal with and talk about an issue that's still very present, and that is the historical legacy of slavery in America," McInnis said.

"What I think is particularly significant about this exhibit is that it has brought together not only different perspectives from different chronological time periods, but also very different takes on what is the legacy and the historical residue of plantation slavery. The exhibit is organized around four themes - protest, politics, nostalgia and identity.

"In each of the areas we have the works arranged with a mix of chronology. We could have done the exhibition chronologically, but I think that's much less interesting than a show that allows the works of art to have conversations with one another around particular topics."

McInnis said the practice of painting views of Southern plantations began to flourish in the early 1800s. As the century advanced and slavery became contested and then abolished, a change occurred in how plantations were depicted.

"In the early 19th century in a number of places in the American South, especially in Maryland and South Carolina, there were artists who began painting plantation views that were very much in the tradition of English estate views," McInnis said.

"They were working very much in the English tradition and applying that same sort of picturesque view of landed estates to the plantation. The people who were buying these paintings were the plantation owners.

"These paintings were, in many ways, meant as a sort of statement of their wealth and status as American landed gentry. The earliest views are all of that sort. They were commissioned [by a plantation owner] largely for private consumption by himself, his family, friends and associates who would be in his house."

An example is the painting of Rose Hill plantation in South Carolina that was done around 1820 by an unknown artist. It provides a somewhat accurate visual inventory of the things that made up a plantation.

What is almost never shown in these early views are the slaves who, to a great extent, made these often vast plantations possible. In the Rose Hill painting only one black person is shown in the sweeping landscape that's replete with buildings, livestock and the shimmering mansion on a rise.

But in the area of South Carolina where the plantation was located, it was not just the brawn of the slaves that was needed. Their knowledge was a key component for success.

"Rice was the gold crop for the South Carolina low country," McInnis said. "It was what made South Carolina the wealthiest colony in British North America.

"By the time of the American Revolution, Charleston was the wealthiest North American city by tenfold. It was the knowledge of how to grow rice that West African slaves brought with them from the rice-growing regions in Africa that enabled all this to happen.

"These English planters didn't known how to grow rice. This was a new crop, and it was the West African slaves who provided the technology and knowledge to do this."

The exhibit's accompanying book includes a chapter written by McInnis, "The Most Famous Plantation of All: The Politics of Painting Mount Vernon." One of the paintings in the exhibit that she focuses on in her essay is "Washington as a Farmer, at Mount Vernon," done in 1851 by Junius Brutus Stearns.

"George Washington is a particularly interesting character for an art historian interested in the construction of historical memory, and the way in which we understand our past," McInnis said.

"He is probably the most recognizable figure from American history. And yet he is also this very malleable figure who has been used by people with different political agendas to lend legitimacy to whatever their view is.

"And so we find, particularly in the antebellum period, two different views of Washington. [There is] one in which he is represented as a benevolent slave holder, and others that don't wish to acknowledge that side of his past present him as the great military leader or the great president."

Another important work in the exhibit that McInnis writes about is the 1857 painting "Kitchen at Mount Vernon" by Eastman Johnson. This painting presents a vivid example of why Johnson was considered equal to Homer in both skill and popularity during their lifetimes.

In fact, Johnson's picture of the barren and gloomy kitchen where a black mother sits with her children might be imagined as an extension of the room in which Homer's old mistress has entered.

"Instead of showing us the house at Mount Vernon, Johnson shows us the interior of one of the slave kitchens," Innis said. "He shows us that building not during the period of Washington's lifetime, but how it appeared to him when he visited in the 1850s.

"What we see in the interior is that it's decaying. The plaster is coming off the walls, bricks are chipped and it's dark and dingy. Johnson's focus on the fact that the building is crumbling and falling apart seems to me to be questioning slavery in the 1850s.

"The way in which it is perhaps a decaying institution. The way in which it perhaps represents a society that is decaying as well, because of it."

"Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art" will be on display at the UVa Museum, 155 Rugby Road, through April 20. 924-3592. Visitors are encouraged to share their comments at http://uvamblogs.com/landscape_of_slavery/." (David A. Maurer, The Daily Progress, February 29, 2008)