1853, Asher Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization) -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
One of the most canonical pictures by a member of the so-called Hudson River school of landscape painters, Asher B. Durand's Progress points to several aspects of cultural and social history, including ecology, Native American policies, and railroads and the Industrial Revolution. Offsetting the locomotive, canal, townscape, and the log cabin at right, the Native American presence (relegated to the left foreground) reminds us of the sacrifices engendered by the "advance of civilization."
Progress was commissioned by financier, industrialist, and collector Charles Gould, who shortly thereafter became broker and then treasurer for the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. Gould did not dictate the style or subject matter of Progress, but he was one of many antebellum patrons who commissioned art, preserving in paint the kind of landscapes threatened by their own interests in locomotive industries.
1853, Asher Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization) -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
One of the most canonical pictures by a member of the so-called Hudson River school of landscape painters, Asher B. Durand's Progress points to several aspects of cultural and social history, including ecology, Native American policies, and railroads and the Industrial Revolution. Offsetting the locomotive, canal, townscape, and the log cabin at right, the Native American presence (relegated to the left foreground) reminds us of the sacrifices engendered by the "advance of civilization."
Progress was commissioned by financier, industrialist, and collector Charles Gould, who shortly thereafter became broker and then treasurer for the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. Gould did not dictate the style or subject matter of Progress, but he was one of many antebellum patrons who commissioned art, preserving in paint the kind of landscapes threatened by their own interests in locomotive industries.