Fred Moffatt Publishes New Book
Frederick Moffatt, emeritus professor of art history, has continued his scholarship unabated since his retirement from teaching in 2005. Just this year, he published Paintbrush for Hire: The Travels of James and Emma Cameron, 1840–1900, with the University of Tennessee Press. His 2009 book, The Life, Art, and Times of Joseph Delaney, 1904–1991, also published by UT Press, is a study of the African American Knoxville painter. Delaney is featured in a special exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art that runs through November 4, 2018.
The subject of Moffatt’s most recent book, the Camerons lived in East Tennessee, including Knoxville, and the American South over a period of 10 years, during which James Cameron plied his trade as a landscapist and portraitist. Based in large part on Emma Cameron’s journals, correspondence, and Civil War diary, Moffatt’s book details their travels, personal lives, and James’s career. It includes illuminating discussions of many of James’s paintings, including Belle Isle from Lyons View, 1859, on display at the Knoxville Museum of Art, and Colonel and Mrs. James A. Whiteside (Son Charles and Servants), 1858-59, on display at the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga. Moffatt describes his book as “in essence a travel narrative and a biography… propelled by Emma’s captivating conversation and idiomatic language.”