Landscape 

Asher Brown Durand painted this Landscape with oil on canvas, and it now resides at the Brooklyn Museum. Durand belonged to the Hudson River School, a mid-19th century American art movement, and his paintings often celebrated the untouched wilderness of the United States. But, let’s ask ourselves, “Untouched by whom?” Durand painted at a time of massive territorial expansion westward, and his work thus participates in the political project of overlooking Indigenous presence on the land. The paintings encouraged the notion of “Manifest Destiny,” the idea that white Americans were divinely entitled to the land. How, then, do we reconcile the undeniable beauty of the painting with the erasure it performs? Durand’s landscapes, with their majestic forests, invite us to reflect on both the sublime beauty of nature, and the narratives of nationhood. In these paintings we see how interwoven the aesthetic and the political can be. They urge us to consider whose stories are told and whose are left out of the picture.