In 1820, Francis Guy captured the village in the dead of winter from his studio on Front Street, in a painting titled Winter Scene in Brooklyn. Francis’s gray winter sky wraps around the busy village of uneven, diagonal streets lined with frame dwellings—homes, stables, and businesses belonging to its residents, who themselves represented a diverse cross-section of class, gender, and race. These residents included Irish immigrants, transplants from New England, descendants of mostly English colonizers, and to a lesser extent the original Dutch (who lived in larger numbers further out in Kings County), free people of African descent, and in smaller numbers enslaved people of African descent too. By 1820, almost all of the Indigenous Lenni Lenape were either murdered or displaced. In spite of virulent racism, this diverse community of early Brooklynites lived in close quarters and inhabited the same streets and public spaces. They resided in neighborhoods that are known today as Downtown Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, and Vinegar Hill.
Scholars have written extensively about the village residents seen and unseen in Francis Guy’s Winter Scene. The painter identified almost all of the Brooklynites of Dutch and English descent, including Abiel Titus, Mrs. Burnett, Judge Garrison, Jacobs Hicks, and Judge Sands, even as he failed to identify the Black Brooklynites who were also clearly visible. In doing so, Francis makes some Black Brooklynites hypervisible while simultaneously securing their erasure. Henry Stiles, Brooklyn’s self-appointed nineteenth-century historian, later identified Samuel Foster, a chimney sweeper who appears on the painting’s far right, and another Black man, Jeff, who stands between his enslaver Abiel Titus, who is feeding chickens, and Mrs. Burnett, who speaks to Abiel’s son on horseback.
Other Black residents include a man who has fallen on the ice while a dog stares at him and another two engaged in hard, manual labor bent over the logs in the painting’s front left. These residents are not afforded the luxury of standing and chatting with their neighbors as the white Brooklynites in the scene do. This “casual collection from all quarters,” as Timothy Dwight, who had served as Yale’s president from 1795 to 1817, observed, included a thriving free Black community. Its residents included Elenor and Elizabeth Croger and their husbands, brothers Peter and Benjamin Croger, respectively. They lived at a time of both tremendous urban growth for the village and, because of gradual emancipation, formidable challenges too.