Jacob Lawrence: The Legend of John Brown from the Mott-Warsh Collection 

 Made up of 22 screen-prints by Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), this series tells the story of white abolitionist John Brown. Using vibrant colors, story-telling precision, and powerful graphic images Lawrence explores the human condition, the African American experience, and American history.

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About Jacob Lawrence
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Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was born in New Jersey and moved with his family to Harlem in 1930 where he came into contact with some of the greatest artistic and intellectual minds of his generation. In the previous decade, Harlem had experienced the remarkably creative period known as the Harlem Renaissance and the neighborhood was still a focal point of African American culture.

Before he was twenty years old, Lawrence had developed a powerful and concise painting style that expressed all of the vibrancy and pathos of his Harlem neighborhood and its occupants. “My pictures express my life and experience. I paint the things I know about and the things I have experienced. The things I have experienced extend into my national, racial, and class group. So, I paint the American scene.” His art explores the human condition, the African American experience, American history, and themes of social justice.

Throughout his career, and particularly during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jacob Lawrence used a series format to convey narrative content. Lawrence’s fascination with movies during the Depression years inspired his approach to storytelling. Lawrence created visual narratives that involved a process similar to the storyboards used to plan the sequence of a film. For his earlier narrative series, Lawrence first wrote the captions and then completed the sketches for each scene. Later he drew directly onto gessoed hardboard panels and then systematically applied one color to each panel, beginning with black and moving on to lighter colors.

Lawrence drafted his imagery on hardboard panels to convey his story meanings, the physical, the historical, the social and the economic significance. He created landscape and portrait orientations with hardboard panels, each the same size, by laying them out on his studio floor. By doing this the thirty to sixty panels of his series could be seen together as a whole and painted at the same time. Lawrence often used unmixed colors so that they would not vary from one panel to the next.

​Lawrence often repeated motifs, shapes, and words throughout his narrative series. In the Migration Series, the repetition of an enlarged single spike or nail, chain links or lattice, hands, and the hammer act as refrains in the lives, experiences, and struggles of African Americans.

About The Legend of John Brown Series

​The Legend of John Brown is made up of 22 screen-prints by African American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) on the subject of the white abolitionist John Brown. The series is Jacob Lawrence at his full artistic strength with vibrant colors, story-telling precision, and powerful graphic images. Lawrence’s art explores the human condition, the African American experience, and American history. This series is also one of Lawrence’s many important contributions to the struggle for social justice in American life.

Lawrence dramatically tells the complex story of John Brown in a narrative graphic novel-like format. In the mid-1850s, Brown organized secret attacks to liberate enslaved people from southern plantations. He led anti-slavery troops in an effort to keep Kansas a free state. Lawrence begins the series with Brown’s decision to become an activist and shows his struggle as an organizer and strategist. He ends it with Brown’s capture, conviction, and execution for treason in the winter of 1859.

Lawrence vividly shows how John Brown’s single-mindedness and violence were heroic, but also foolish and reckless. Brown was a controversial figure during his own lifetime and still is today. What began as an attack on supporters of slavery swelled into an effort to bring about the complete downfall of the South. Brown’s actions and notoriety contributed to the onset of the American Civil War, which ultimately achieved his goal of ending slavery. But his tactics were daring and sometimes misguided, resulting in bloody battles and heavy losses, including the death of Brown’s own son. Lawrence tells this intense story, asking us questions, but not giving us any easy answers.

The Legend of John Brown series explores a critical moment in American history. Lawrence’s series highlights the important role of art and artists in interpreting and sharing history.
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Photographs: Part of Washington's State Art Collection. Photo courtesy of the artist and the Washington State Arts Commission.

© 2023 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York