The West in the American Imagination

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) argued that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” Although contemporary scholars dispute this thesis, the argument has a powerful hold on the American imagination. When the English first landed in what they called the New World, the artist John White created visual records of their explorations. The artists of the first great school of national art in this country, the Hudson River School, initially found inspiration in the beauty of the forests and mountains of upstate New York and New England. Hudson River School painters, however, soon turned to the ever-advancing frontier, documenting the traditions and customs of Native American tribes and the transformation of wilderness into areas of settlement. In the twentieth century, the frontier became even more mythic, further establishing the visual stereotypes of the Plains Indian, the cowboy, and a landscape of desert canyon and sky.