Gould Pond, New Hampshire; verso: Partial Landscape Possibly 1859

Editor: This is Benjamin Champney's sketch, "Gould Pond, New Hampshire," created with graphite. It has a very serene, almost melancholic feel. What do you see in this piece? Curator: I see a landscape deeply embedded in the 19th-century American narrative of expansion and resource extraction. The romanticism of the scene, with its delicate rendering, masks the underlying tension of land use and ownership. Consider how notions of "wilderness" were constructed during this period. Editor: Constructed? How so? Curator: By erasing Indigenous presence and justifying colonial claims. Champney’s idyllic scene normalizes this erasure. The calm surface hides a history of dispossession, doesn't it? Editor: I never thought of it that way. It's unsettling to see such beauty intertwined with such a difficult history. Curator: Exactly. Art can be a powerful tool for revealing these hidden stories, forcing us to confront uncomfortable truths about our past and present.