Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (French Trader and Half-Breed Son)

~The tremendous and ongoing popularity of representations of non-Indigenous hunters in both the United States and Australia first arose in the early and late decades of the nineteenth century, respectively. These images ranged from small narrative vignettes in the margins of wilderness landscapes to sporting scenes proper featuring...

~~Before we, too, abandon Ariadne on her desert isle, let us pause to consider her as the foundation of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. The future wife of Bacchus, nature god of wine and revelry, Ariadne, in all her sumptuous availability, is the trope of bountiful America ready for the taking. Such availability, in...

Perhaps nowhere in western American art is the genre’s longstanding tension between...