Behind the big-wigged portraits and grand landscapes of early American art are surprising stories about race relations and attitudes in the United States.

Researching the 150 paintings and sculpture in "Noble Dreams and Simple Pleasures," on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts through May 3, curator Sue Canterbury found remarkable tales, especially about black artists who somehow pursued independent careers in the early 1800s when slavery was still legal in the fledgling nation.

There's a sweet 1815 portrait of a little boy, Richard John Cock, in a misty garden pointing at a butterfly, a symbol signaling that the picture was done after the boy's death as a keepsake for his grieving parents. While that's all very conventional, the painter, Joshua Johnson, is not.

A prominent portraitist in the Baltimore area, he was born a slave. Johnson's mother was an enslaved African-American and his father a free white man who eventually bought the boy from his owner, had him trained as a blacksmith and freed him after his apprenticeship. Rather than pursue the career his father envisioned, Johnson (1765-1830) struck out on his own as an artist and soon had a roster of affluent white clients.

"It's fascinating that a former slave could fashion such a life for himself at that time in a society like Maryland," said Canterbury.

The show, which features paintings on loan from private collectors in the Twin Cities, includes many of the 19th century's marquee names (Durand, Whistler, Sargent). Spanning a century of westward expansion by white explorers and settlers, it ranges broadly from simple portraits and still lifes through grand landscapes of the Hudson River Valley and New England vistas, to scenes of Fort Snelling in the 1850s when Indians still erected their tents nearby, and to urban scenes from the early 1920s.

The paintings make no overt reference to the African-Americans who were part of the national dialogue then, but Canterbury has woven that subtext into the show's labels when appropriate, and they make fascinating reading.

Robert Scott Duncanson, for example, produced in 1848 a graceful "Still Life With Fruit and Nuts." Nothing in the elegant composition hints that Duncanson (1821-72) was the son of a Scottish man and a free African-American woman or that he traveled widely from New York state into Canada and across the Midwest, working in Cincinnati, Detroit and Minnesota, which he visited in 1862 and again in 1869.

"The Mississippi was considered a great wonder and a lot of artists were exploring its upper reaches" in the mid-1800s, said Canterbury. While in Minnesota, Duncanson painted Minnehaha and Minneopa Falls as well as Lake Pepin, and traveled as far north as Duluth and Lake Superior, she said.

Painter settled in St. Paul

He was not the only black artist to do so. One of the show's eye-catchers is a dramatic 1894 panorama of the "Mississippi at Winona," by Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918), a free-born black from Pennsylvania who became the first African-American to paint the major geological landmarks of the Pacific Northwest, according to Canterbury. He headed for San Francisco about 1860, most likely to dodge slave catchers who were indiscriminately rounding up blacks regardless of their legal status.

During the 1880s, he worked for a Canadian geological survey team and a decade later was in Minnesota. Trained as a lithographer, he settled in St. Paul and worked in the city's civil engineering department from 1897 to 1910.

"Brown had a very interesting career and was very successful, yet people aren't aware of his contributions," Canterbury said. "I'm always interested in making black artists part of the fabric of the period, because it wasn't as easy for them to conduct their careers because of the racial tensions of the era."

Blacks were not alone in their struggles, however. Canterbury discovered that several of the show's white artists were ardent abolitionists who risked their lives and livelihoods in the effort to eradicate slavery. Folk artists Robert Deacon Peckham (1785-1877) and Sheldon Peck (1797-1868) ran stations on the Underground Railroad that helped runaway slaves escape. Another painting depicts "Mrs. William E. Goodnow," whose husband commissioned it to take with him to Kansas when he and 100 other New Englanders settled there in an effort to make it a "free" state.

Even "Sugaring Off," Eastman Johnson's jolly scene of New Englanders gathering maple sap in a snowy woods, has abolitionist undercurrents, Canterbury said. The artist did a whole series about maple sugar that implicitly criticized the way cane sugar was produced in the South.

"He was trying to show that gathering sugar in the North was a community activity that people had fun doing in comparison with [slaves] gathering sugar cane at the end of a whip," said Canterbury.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431