Farmer Garfield: Cutting A Swath To The White House

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The lithograph printed by the Currier and Ives publishing company in 1880 called, “Farmer Garfield: Cutting a Swath to the White House depicts an aspect of the presidential campaign between James Adam Garfield and Winfield Scott Hancock. (LoC) In the center of the lithograph is James A. Garfield taking up most of the length of the poster holding a sheathe that has the words “Honesty, Ability, and Patriotism” inscribed into it and it looks as if he is using it to cut away a garden of snakes that are in the bottom right corner. Behind Garfield, to the left is a continuous wheat field and then to the right sits the White House. The poster demonstrates a multitude of various elements that play into the overall composition and design of the work such as representation, use of symbols, text and image, and the details used. The first element is the artist’s …show more content…

Because the artist constantly created a relationship between text and image, each incorporation has a slightly different relationship. The first is that the sheathe without the text inscribed would just be seen as a sharp, brutal, farming object, but with the text it creates a new meaning. In this case, the text can be deemed as prioritized because the there is a reliability the sheathe has with the words. The second is the incorporation of words in within the corrupted snake garden. In this case it tells viewers that not only are there people and institutions in the government whose actions can be deemed slithery and comparable to a snake, but also combined with the inscribed words such as falsehood, malice, venom, and hatred. If it wasn’t already explicit enough, the artist is trying to convey not only is the government is infiltrated with snakes, but they also represent extremely negative behaviors. In case, I think the text is reliant on the image because without the words viewers could get still get the point it’s trying to

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