Ronald Carter, Bennett College’s acting president, called Aaron Douglas’s painting Harriet Tubman “powerful”. “It’s awesome to look at the symbolism, and for me as an African American to actually say, Yes!” he said.
The six-feet-wide painting will be sold at Sotheby’s New York on November 18. It is expected to sell for between $2.5 million–$3.5 million, the highest estimate ever placed on a work by Douglas.
The work comes from the holdings of Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, one of just two historically Black women’s colleges in the US. Founded in a church basement in 1873, Bennett became a women’s college in 1926. With Atlanta’s Spelman College, it is one of just two all-women HBCUs. In 1955, under Willa Beatrice Player, Bennett became the first four-year college in the US led by a Black woman.
Chicago philanthropist Alfred K. Stern commissioned Douglas to make the work for a dining hall at Bennett. Douglas created Harriet Tubman in 1931, presenting its subject as “a heroic leader breaking the shackles of bondage and pressing on toward a new day”. Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and went on some 13 missions to rescue about 70 enslaved people via the Underground Railroad.
Douglas was Kansas-born and moved to Harlem in the 1920s. Philosopher Alain Locke called him “the father of Black American Art”. His previous auction high was $600,000, set in 2008 when Building More Stately Mansions (1944) sold at Swann Galleries.
The painting, from Bennett’s holdings, hung for two decades at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Bennett’s Women’s Health Initiative was launched in January.
After more than two years of deliberation, the college decided to auction the painting. Proceeds will support initiatives including women’s health equity. The work goes on public view at Sotheby’s New York headquarters beginning November 7, ahead of the November 18 sale.
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