John Gast

The woman floating west across the continent in American Progress carries a schoolbook in one hand and strings telegraph wire with the other. Behind her, in the east, come cities, railways and settlers. Ahead of her, Native Americans and herds of bison retreat into a darker West. The painting is small, about 29 by 40 centimetres, and it was made to be copied.

George Crofutt, a publisher of travel guides to the American West, commissioned it in 1872 and reproduced it as a chromolithograph in his guidebooks. In that form it reached a wide public as a picture of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States was bound to spread across the continent. Crofutt called the star she wears on her forehead "The Star of Empire".

John Gast earned his living mainly as a lithographer. Born in Berlin in 1842, he grew up in Missouri in a family of lithographers, studied art in Berlin and Paris, and settled in Brooklyn, where he worked for the New York Daily Graphic and patented several lithographic processes. American Progress is now in the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.