As a white, Southern artist living near the end of the Jim Crow era, Edmund Archer stood apart from his contemporaries. Considered one of the best American artists of his generation, Archer frequently portrayed African Americans on his canvases.

Unlike many of his white colleagues, Archer didn’t list into racist caricature in his artwork. Instead, he depicted his Black sitters — who were often Richmonders — with respectful formality.

“It was not normal for Southern artists,” says Christina K. Vida, the Valentine’s Elise H. Wright Curator of General Collections, of Archer’s realistic portrayals of African Americans during that period. “Early on, he’s making sure that his works are representative of real life here in Richmond.”

His canvases are filled with striking subjects: a laborer hauling bricks; a woman in a red dress looking away from the viewer; members of the Elks, an African American fraternal order, marching down the street in spats and straw hats.

In late September, the exhibition “Edmund Archer: Perspectives on Black Dignity” opened at the Valentine, featuring ten works by the Richmond native. The paintings are on loan from the artist’s niece Mollie Archer Payne and great-nephew Guy Archer; many haven’t been seen by the public for half a century.

“The portraits are so honest,” says Vida, who co-curated the exhibit with Guy. “They’re really reflecting the dignity of these Richmonders to today’s guests.”

A social realist

Born in 1904, Archer took classes as an adolescent from local artists and suffragists Adèle Clark and Nora Houston in Richmond before studying and painting in Charlottesville, New York City, Washington, D.C., Rome, Paris, Arezzo, Italy, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

In 1930, a critic for The New York Times wrote that Archer had “accomplished a tour de force” with his painting “Show Girl,” calling it “so powerful a painting, so brilliant in its contrasts of color, so sound in its drawing, that it strikes a distinct note in modern art.” In 1938, two years after the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts opened its doors, Archer had a solo exhibition there. In 1941, Life magazine called him “Virginia’s most important contemporary artist.”

In addition to painting, Archer worked as assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and taught at the Corcoran School of Art and George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Archer probably would have had a higher profile, but he was a social realist as the art world was shifting to abstraction and got caught in the transition. A critic once wrote that he was the Corcoran’s most conservative painter, referring to his art.

Connections to Richmond

He returned to Richmond in 1926 and rented the former studio of sculptor Edward Virginius Valentine. The studio, a former carriage house from the 1830s, was where Valentine created racist statuary and sculptures that celebrated the Lost Cause. Relocated to the Valentine Museum in 2005, the space now houses “Sculpting History at the Valentine Studio,” an exhibition dedicated to unpacking the racist ideology’s insidious nature.

Archer has another connection to the Valentine. In 1957 and 1958, the museum featured his work as part of an exhibition that celebrated three generations of artists, including Clark and Archer’s great-uncle William Ludlow Sheppard. The latter was a famous lithographer, painter and sculptor who created the 1894 Confederate Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument that stood on Libby Hill until it was removed in 2020.

Sheppard wasn’t Archer’s only high profile family member. His father William Wharton Archer was the editor of two newspapers, the Richmond Standard and the Richmond State. His mother, Rosalie Harrison Pleasants Archer, served on a council dedicated to preventing lynchings and was “active in interracial work,” according to her obituary. After the death of Edmund’s older brother Adair to Spanish flu in 1918, Rosalie took over an amateur theater company that he had started in Richmond.

Edmund Archer left his own civic mark on Richmond by co-founding the Hand Workshop arts center with Elisabeth Scott Bocock in 1963; in 2005, the Hand Workshop was renamed the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.

After retiring from teaching in 1968, Archer lived out the remainder of his days on Foushee Street. He died in 1986 at the age of 81.

While the VMFA and the American University Museum have some of Archer’s work, a full accounting of his oeuvre has yet to take place.

“His works are not limited to just here in Richmond,” Vida says. “We’re hoping, through this exhibition, to raise his profile and maybe learn the whereabouts of other Edmund Archer paintings that haven’t been documented in 20 or 30 years.”

“Edmund Archer: Perspectives on Black Dignity” is on display through Sept. 1, 2025, at the Valentine Museum, 1015 E. Clay St. For more information, visit thevalentine.org or call (804) 649-0711.