John Brown Going to His Hanging, by Horace Pippin, 1942.


It is a bleak and dreary day, with leaf bare trees. Figures face the wagon that carries John Brown, who is tied with rope and sitting on his own coffin. In the bottom right hand corner, a black woman in a blue and white dress, shawl, and hat faces the viewer.
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John Brown Going to His Hanging, by Horace Pippin, 1942. Pippin's mother Christine told of how her mother had been a slave in Virginia and had watched the hanging of the antislavery leader John Brown. Horace's grandmother appears in the painting, in the lower right hand corner. John Brown is shown tied with rope and sitting on his own coffin