Bandanna Ballads.

WEEDEN, Howard. [Maria Howard Weeden; Joel Chandler Harris].

$2,850.00

Item Number: 133067

New York: Doubleday & McClure Company, 1899.

First edition of Maria Howard Weeden’s best-known collection of poems. Octavo, original cloth decorated in gilt, illustrated by the author, tissue-guarded frontispiece. Introduction by Joel Chandler Harris. Presentation copy, inscribed by Harris on the flyleaf, “Faithfully yours: Joel Chandler Harris Atlanta Ga.: 6 September 1900.” Additionally signed by him on the title page and at the conclusion of the introduction. In fine condition. Housed in a custom clamshell box. Rare and desirable.

American artist and poet Maria Howard Weeden gained international fame following the American Civil War for her detailed and sympathetic portraits of African American freedmen and freedwomen. A native of Huntsville Alabama, she attended the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 where she was dismayed by other artists whose works featuring freedmen and freedwomen showed them in the caricature style of minstrel shows. She returned to Huntsville determined to express the full humanity and dignity of freedmen. Her images included pictures of many freed African Americans who worked as servants for her and friends' families. While she painted, she listened to their accounts of their lives and of folktales, and later adapted some of these as poems, which she wrote in the black dialect. In 1895, Weeden exhibited several portraits of African-American freedmen and freedwomen in Berlin and Paris, where they were well received. Her paintings were praised by writers Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, and Harris wrote the foreword to her book Bandanna Ballads.