Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

Leutze painted this on the wall of the Capitol between 1861 and 1862, while the Civil War was being fought a short ride away. The title comes from an old line about empires moving west, and the scene is a wagon train of settlers reaching a mountain pass, straining toward a golden Pacific painted below. He worked in stereochromy, a German method of binding pigment to plaster with water glass, meant to last for centuries. Look at the centre and there is a young Black man leading a horse up the slope. Leutze added him after Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia in April 1862, so the figure entered the picture as a free person in the very months the paint was drying.