David and Art - “A Painting with Many Topics, part 2”

Last week I told you that much to my surprise, I recently found out that I had written about the same painting in two of my books. Something about this particular painting caused it to pop up twice in widely different topics for me. I was apparently sensing something about it—something that it said, or something that it showed—which could be used to understand other stories. And that’s exactly what it was. The painting is called Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way. It’s technically a mural in the US Capitol building and it was painted in 1861. This is how I described it in my 2008 book Money for Art:  The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy.

“At the apex of the 20-by-30-foot painting stands a lone figure on a rocky promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean, raising his hat in joyful celebration. From the ledge below, a second figure hands up to him an unfurled American flag. In the foreground, throngs of Americans, including a black man, scramble to see the western ocean and San Francisco Bay, the end of what we assumed to have been an arduous cross-country journey. Obviously more than just a painting, the work conveyed a powerful and hopeful nationalistic message.”

In this book, the painting appears in the introduction. I go on to say that the commissioning of the painting itself revealed certain things about the United States. On the one hand, the painting speaks of the hope—the anticipation, even—of the inevitable triumph of the United States over disunion, secession, and rebellion: the hope that no matter how bleak things looked, the country had a bright future ahead of it. Art critic Robert Hughes once wrote that “if there was anyone who could be relied on to produce a large, efficient, patriotic machine whose meaning would be over no one’s head that person was Leutze.” The Stars and Stripes being passed up to the top of the promontory, Hughes added for good measure “conveyed the message that only the union could carry Americans into the golden future of westward expansion.” Toward the bottom of the mural there are two medallion portraits, one of William Clark—he of the Lewis & Clark Expedition—and legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone. Leutze is reminding his viewer of the famous pioneers in the past who pointed the way the country’s future lay.

On the other hand, that the painting was there at all speaks to the belief that art itself could effectively and powerfully convey that hope to members of Congress who passed underneath this painting every day walking to and from their work. By virtue of putting that painting where it is, the government is saying that art can achieve things for the good of the country.

Now, what on earth could this painting have to do with George Dewey? We’ll get to that.