In “American Work of Benjamin West” William Sawitzky argues that “When today the bulk of his work fails to stir our imagination and to satisfy us aesthetically, it is owing to the fact that emotionally and artistically he was incapable of touching great heights or depths and even at best remained a second rate technician”. This paper will try to refute this claim by analyzing the emotional intensity and break away from tradition in West’s works, using formal analysis of Benjamin West’s Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus. Based on a dramatic episode from Roman history, the scene shows the widowed Agrippina returning to Rome carrying the ashes of her assassinated husband, Germanicus, whose rising career abruptly ended when a political rival poisoned him in Antioch. West takes as his subject heroic death, and the fictional aspects of his composition are blended within the factual accuracy of history. Borrowed motifs appear throughout the picture but mostly appear in the central group of figures. The figural group recalls Ara Pacis Augustae with the treatment of draperies and the child clinging to his mother’s robe. The background architecture is based on another Roman example, the palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro on the Dalmatian coast. West modifies these borrowed motifs from classical art to fit into his narrative and uses them not to embellish his inventions but as a way of evoking the look and the feeling of ancient world to better illustrate his subject. In this sense, West resolves the competing claims of factual accuracy and art within the bounds of painting and becomes not a technician but a “poetic inventor” (Prown). This skillful borrowing elevates West from being a second-rate to a ... ... middle of paper ... ...se references and brings a whole new meaning to his historical narratives and moves the viewer. In so many ways, this work exceeds the idea of a narrative and understands that the purpose of a painting is to be in dialogue with other paintings of the past and combining them to move forward. This work may not be result of pure artistic imagination like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights but it still achieves to touch the great depth of sorrow of the ancient times by internalizing, modifying and possibly overcoming the works of the past and makes something authentically its own. Prown, Jules David. Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Print. Works Cited Prown, Jules David. Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Print.
The West is a very big part of American culture, and while the myth of the West is much more enticing than the reality of the west, it is no doubt a very big part of America. We’re constantly growing up playing games surrounded by the West such as cowboys and Indians and we’re watching movies that depict the cowboy to be a romanticized hero who constantly saves dames in saloons and rides off into the sunset. However, the characters of the West weren’t the only things that helped the development of America; many inventions were a part of the development of the West and helped it flourish into a thriving community. Barbed wire, the McCormick reaper and railroads—for example—were a large part of the development in the West—from helping to define claimed land boundaries, agricultural development and competition, and even growth of the West.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Learner: Primary Sources. Annenberg Learner, Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
Parker, Nathan Howe. Parker's Illustrated Hand Book of the Great West a Record of Statistics and Facts, with Practical Suggestions for Immigrants as to Profitable Investment of Labor & Capital in Industrial Pursuits in the Great West .. New York: American News, 1869. Print.
In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
1. Lambert, Dale A. Pacific Northwest History. 4th Edition. Wenatchee: Directed Media, 1997. 150-151. Print
As history cascades through an hourglass, the changing, developmental hands of time are shrouded throughout American history. This ever-changing hourglass of time is reflected in the process of maturation undertaken by western America in the late nineteenth century. Change, as defined by Oxford’s Dictionary, is “To make or become different through alteration or modification.” The notion of change is essential when attempting to unwind the economic make-up of Kansas in the 1880’s and 1890’s. Popular culture often reveres the American cowboy, which has led him to become the predominate figure in America’s “westering” experience (Savage, p3). However, by 1880 the cowboy had become a mythical figure rather than a presence in western life. The era of the cowboy roaming the Great Plains had past and farmers now sought to become the culturally dominant figure and force in the American West. Unlike the cowboys, farmers were able to evolved, organizing and establishing the Populist Party. The farmers’ newly formed political organization provided them with a voice, which mandated western reform. Furthermore, the populist ideas spread quickly and dominated western thought in the 1880’s and 1890’s. The period of the 1880’s and 1890’s marked the end of the American cowboy and gave farmers a political stronghold that would forever impact the modernization of the West.
Frontier in American History is divided in two major parts each with an introduction. The first part claims that the gradual settlement of the west is what forms American History. In the following four paragraphs the frontier is explained in details. The frontier is viewed as a moving belts
The West: From Lewis and Clark and Wounded Knee: The Turbulent Story of the Settling of Frontier America.
Divine, Robert A. America past and Present. 10th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education/Longman, 2013. 245. Print.
13 Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (New York: The New Library of American Literature, 1963), 223.
Davidson, James West. The American Nation: Independence through 1914. Upper Saddle River. Prentice Hall. 2000.
To many families the prospect of owning land was the central driving force that brought them to the land known today as the wild Wild West. Much propaganda wa...
Davidson, James W., and Michael B. Stoff. The American Nation. Eaglewood Cliffs: Paramount Communications, 1995.
Early on the American government dressed up the culture and opportunities that lay in the West to get more westward expansion. The tr...