John Woolman’s Dream of the Fox and the Cat

Leonard Baskin

Drawings

John Woolman’s Dream of the Fox and the Cat

21×19 in

Broadside with woodcut

Jackie Leach Scully describes Baskin’s broadside in her book, Good and Evil: Quaker Perspectives:

There is a woodblock print by Leonard Baskin of ‘John Woolman’s Dream of the Fox and the Cat’ which creates a vivid illustration of Woolman’s awareness of horrible injustice in the world. In the woodcut’s foreground is a vicious fox-cat with bared teeth and claws, and in the background is the figure of a hanged ‘old Negro man’ whose flesh was to be fed to the fox-cat. In Woolman’s narrative of the dream there is the further addition of a woman calmly drinking tea, who looks on from the position of privilege (as do perhaps the viewers of the woodcut and the readers of the Journal) unmoved by this violence against a fellow human being. Woolman writes that in the dream, ‘I stood silent all this time and was filled with extreme sorrow at so horrible an action and now began to lament bitterly. . . but none mourned with me.

R. MICHELSON GALLERIES

Fine Art Gallery, Art Restoration, & Picture Framing

Leonard Baskin

Drawings

John Woolman’s Dream of the Fox and the Cat