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Thomas Satterwhite Noble, 1835-1907, "Margaret Garner or The Modern Medea," oil on canvas, 1867;

Margaret Garner (1834-1858?)escaped from slavery in Kentucky in 1856 and fled with her four children to Ohio. She was pursued by her owner and constables who tried, under the authority of the Fugitive Slave Law, to apprehend her. When she was about to be captured, she informed her captors that she would kill her children so as to prevent their having to endure slavery, then she killed her two-year old daughter and inflicted non-fatal wounds on her other three children. Noble paints the bodies of two slain children which lie at her feet, as two children beg for their lives and four captors charge into the room from the left.
A woodcut of Noble's original painting was printed with a narrative in Harpers Weekly 18 May 1867.
Accounts of Ms Gardner's death vary: her husband said she died of typhoid fever in 1858, while the Harpers chronicler says she took her own life by drowning.

It is, of course, highly unlikely that Mrs Gardner was emulating Medea knowingly in 1856; by 1867, however, the connections between the myth and Mrs Garner's real-life tragedy were made clearly. The author of the Harper Weekly piece extols Ms Garner's "far nobler jealousy than that which actuated the mythical Medea." (click here). But Noble had already made the connection by titling the painting as he did. Thus, Noble's narrative gain lies in equating Mrs Garner to the mythological Medea.