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题目内容
题目材料：
In 1825, emancipated slave Pierre Toussaint, who had become a successful New York hairdresser, commissioned miniature portraits of himself, his wife, Juliette, and his adopted niece. It was an unconventional choice. Judging by the extant evidence, those few antebellum African Americans who commissioned portraits chose bust-sized oil paintings, paintings that announced their status--their respectability, their prosperity, and their personhood--to the public at large. And, given the implicit publicity of these paintings, it is not surprising that so many represent men: African-descended ministers, activists, barbers, and men of affairs, men who were assuming positions of leadership within the North's free black communities. It is not clear why Toussaint, a public-minded man who was deeply involved in a variety of philanthropic efforts, diverged from this pattern by choosing to represent himself, much less his entire family, in a genre so closely associated with domestic intimacy. Perhaps he associated miniatures with the gentility and refinement of his wealthy clientele. Perhaps he was attracted to the genre's familial associations. Toussaint was, after all, a man who prized family, who expended great effort to preserve family ties against overwhelming odds; after moving to New York, he had tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to recover family members who had been lost during the Haitian Revolution. Or perhaps miniatures recalled a pivotal moment in his own life, a moment that fused gentility, familial intimacy, and freedom, for when Toussaint's former mistress was on her deathbed, she bequeathed him her miniature portrait along with his freedom papers.
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