Boy Asleep at the Base of a Tree is emblematic of the ambivalence many White painters had for Black subjects in the nineteenth century. James Clonney here layers pervasive cultural stereotypes with veiled references to contemporary political debates over slavery. While a young boy dressed in tattered clothing naps beneath a tree, a storm brews in the distance. Before the Civil War, the image of a sleeping African American was a common trope that, in some cases, referred to a suspension between enslavement and the awakening of emancipation.