Two paintings by Robert S. Duncanson sat hidden beneath layers of paint and plaster for more than 150 years inside what is now the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati — until a conservator spent five months stripping them back to daylight. The museum unveiled the restored still lifes, depicting fruit and vegetables above doorways in the former residence, work that wrapped up in October 2026.
The paintings are part of a larger cycle Duncanson created for horticulturalist and art patron Nicholas Longworth, who commissioned eight monumental landscapes and four smaller still lifes for the walls of his home between 1850 and 1852, according to the Taft Museum of Art. That home is now the museum itself. Conservator Michael Ruzga, of Fine Arts Conservation Inc., led the painstaking removal of seven layers of grime, paint, and plaster covering roughly 20,000 square inches of artwork, as reported by the Cincinnati Enquirer.
According to WVXU, Ruzga described the project as removing seven layers of paint and plaster over five months of work. The outlet reports the two overdoor murals were discovered in 1932, though Spectrum News 1 has separately reported the rediscovery happened in 1933 — the exact year remains disputed between the two accounts.
What the Paint Was Hiding
Once uncovered, the restored still lifes showed off Duncanson's vibrant color work, including grapes dangling from a bowl — a detail the Enquirer's reporting ties to Longworth himself, often described as America's first successful winemaker. The Taft Museum notes two of Duncanson's still lifes remain hidden beneath wall paint today, and that a conservator recreated one of them above the Music Room door in the early 1930s rather than uncovering the original.
The murals' history includes damage beyond paint. Per the Enquirer's reporting, Angela Fuller said a new door was cut into a wall to replace two older doors, likely destroying another Duncanson landscape mural in the process. The Taft Museum's own account of the house's history similarly describes a new arched entryway that mostly destroyed two overdoor murals along with a third, unidentified mural.
Science Behind the Restoration
Conservation work went beyond scraping away plaster. The team analyzed the walls using infrared reflectography, X-ray fluorescence, and Raman spectroscopy, techniques that revealed both the underdrawing and the pigments Duncanson used, the Enquirer reported. Soapbox described the imaging in vivid terms, noting that graphite lines began to emerge beneath the finished paintings as the analysis progressed, according to Soapbox. The Taft Museum's own records confirm that infrared photography, X-ray fluorescence, and Raman spectroscopy were part of the broader conservation project's scientific analysis.
This is not the murals' first brush with restoration. The Taft Museum says the artwork was restored once in 1932 and conserved again between 1994 and 2000, and the museum's collection records note that the mural was covered with wallpaper by 1871 until the house was converted into a museum around 1931-32. In 1976, the Duncanson Murals and the house itself were designated National Historic Landmarks, per the museum.
The Artist Behind the Murals
Duncanson was born free in New York around 1821 and moved to Cincinnati in 1840 to begin a fine-art career, according to the Enquirer's reporting. He became the first Black painter to gain international recognition in the years before and after the Civil War, noted for landscapes and works inspired by literature, and he often received patronage from abolitionists. Duncanson died in 1872 at age 51.
A Retrospective Is Coming to Cincinnati
The restoration work is timed to a major upcoming exhibition. The Taft Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts have organized a Duncanson retrospective featuring approximately 80 paintings and ephemera, per WVXU's reporting. The show is scheduled to run at the Taft from October 30, 2027, to February 6, 2028, before traveling to Virginia from April 8 to July 23, 2028.
It will mark the museum's first major Duncanson exhibition in three decades. The Taft has previously mounted a Duncanson exhibition. The newly uncovered still lifes offer a tangible link to a cycle of paintings that spent a century and a half hidden behind someone else's choice of wallpaper.
