American Progress?

The painting from class today that most piqued my interest was American Progress, which was painted by Asher Brown Durand, an artist of the Hudson River School, in 1853. I found the painting interesting because of its surreal and grand depiction of an idealized rather than realistic landscape, which we learned was characteristic of art of the Hudson River School.

To the left side of the painting, we see an uncivilized and unsettled wilderness--the forests seem overgrown and untouched relative to the tidy vegetation of the settled landscape to the right. In the distance, there seem to be smoke stacks, which suggests an urban landscape--the highest degree of civilization. As we follow the road forward and to the left, the landscape seems to become gradually less civilized--we see what appears to be a small town with a church steeple followed by a log cabin and finally the unsettled wilderness (if you don’t consider the native americans). We talked in class today about the role of time in art, which I think is especially relevant here. Although the painting depicts a specific moment, it also portrays changes in the landscape that could only occur over generations. Based on the direction of the wagons on the road, we conclude that the progression of the painting is from right to left (or, equivalently, east to west). This painting made me think back to Wandering Home, in which McKibben contrasts the relatively unsettled wilderness of New York with the more civilized, pastoral landscape of Vermont. The white church steeple in the distance seems especially reminiscent of Vermont.

It seems as if this painting does not perfectly parallel the settlement of the Adirondacks. In the painting, civilization seems to be a dominant and inexorable force--we are led to believe that the entire landscape will eventually resemble the city in the distance, even though the natives clearly present a challenge to this "progress". However, this was not the case with settlement in the Adirondacks. Early human attempts to conquer the wilderness were mostly unsuccessful. Moreover, the effort to preserve Adirondack wilderness suggests that the force of human settlement is not a strong as the painting suggests and a backward progression in time.

By the way, I could have written a similar post for the painting Manifest Destiny, which was painted about 20 years after American Progress by another American Artist, John Gast. Check it out--the composition and allegorical meaning of the two works are very similar.