Robert S. Duncanson
A self-taught painter from Monroe who became the first African American artist known internationally.
Duncanson was born in Fayette, New York, and moved to Monroe, Michigan, in 1828 after his father's death. He apprenticed in house painting and carpentry, started a painting business in 1838, and gave it up a year later to paint portraits. He had no formal art education. He learned by copying prints and engravings and by sketching from nature.
From 1845 he worked mainly in Detroit as an itinerant portrait painter, and his landscapes later earned him a reputation well beyond Michigan. American newspapers of the 1860s called him the "greatest landscape painter in the West." He is counted among the second generation of the Hudson River School.
He died in Detroit in 1872 after a seizure while setting up an exhibition, and was buried in Monroe. His work faded from view until it was rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s.