Andrew Melrose, "Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way" 1867
from the Personal Collection of E. William Judson
Melrose is deliberately evoking Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's painting
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, which hangs in the
U.S. Capitol. While Leutze depicts a mythological scene of Conestoga Wagons,
pioneers on horseback, Daniel Boone figures, and truimphant families descending
from what must be the Sierra Nevada mountains to find a pastoral landscape of plenty
by the Pacific Ocean, Melrose paints a more realistic and ironic scene. Although this scene
also shows a tension between wilderness and civilization through the
newly constructed log cabin on the left and the standing trees and deer on the right, the jarring
presence of the railroad questions the distinction between the two. The cabin is surrounded
by the stumps of cleared trees, and the deer run from the intrusion of the train, but
have no refuge from it in the human side of the painting. This painting questions
the positivism of progress and appeals to a sense of nostalgia for the aboriginal
state of American wilderness, which the Romantics would absorb and explore in their art and literature.
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