At the learned suggestion of Paperweight Harrogate checked out this painting early in the week. Interesting to compare with the Gast piece that Harrogate posted a while back. Here is a blurb Harrogate found on the piece:In “Progress” an imaginary topography suggesting the Catskills and the Hudson River is replete with villages, farms, steamboats and a railroad. A dazzling city sits near the horizon, struck by the light from a benignly expansive sky. In the not-so-pretty foreground, a hardscrabble road leads out of the picture, and a clutch of American Indians survey the alarming scene from a rock in a forest area packed into the lower left corner of the canvas.
Dr. P.W., et. al: Thoughts on the blurb? On the painting?
2 comments:
An interesting discussion in which the power of the "white" (dazzling city, etc.) is privileged over the marginalized. In fact it those dazzling cities of the east that were marching down those "hardscrabble road[s]" that were destroying the world of the Indians before their eyes. Indeed, the Indians were forced into "not-so-pretty" landscapes by the Western progression, pushing the Native Americans to the brink of destruction--as quoted from Angela Miller (Art Historian), "an Indian family stands on the western edge of the continent, contemplating the the sun as its sinks below the horizon, the emblem of their defeat. There is nowhere else to go."
It is important to note as well that by the 19th century, Native Americans become connected to the idea of nature, so as they disappeared so to did the natural beauty (and agrarian life) of America as it is replaced by industrialization and commodity culture.
I always think of _The Last of the Mohicans_ when I see this painting, which fits the information that Paperweight has shared with us.
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