American Progress

This was never meant to hang in a museum. In 1872 a publisher of western travel guides, George Crofutt, hired John Gast to paint an advertisement he could turn into cheap colour prints and mail across the country. The blonde giant floating over the plains is Columbia, a stand-in for the United States, trailing telegraph wire in one hand and a schoolbook in the other as she moves west. Ahead of her, in the shadow she has not yet reached, Gast painted Native people, buffalo and a bear driven off the land. The transcontinental railroad had been finished only three years earlier, and the picture sold the idea that the whole continent was America's to fill. Crofutt's prints did the rest, carrying the image into thousands of parlours.