Browse Items (110 total)
Sort by:
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way
Emanuel Leutze’s mural celebrates the western expansion of the United States. A group of pioneers and their train of covered wagons are pictured at the continental divide, looking towards the sunset and the Pacific Ocean. The border depicts vignettes…
Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap
This is a popular American painting addressing the theme of westward expansion. Rich with symbolism, it helped establish the mythic status of Daniel Boone and legends of western settlement.
George Caleb Bingham drew from Christian and classical…
Emigrants Crossing the Plains
Redefined by territorial expansion in the mid-1800s, the boundary of the American West shifted from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, fueled largely by exploration and emigration along the Oregon Trail, among others.
Over the course of…
American Progress
This painting is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Here Columbia, a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she sweeps west; she holds a…
Daniel Boone protects his family
Daniel Boone fighting with a Native, as his wife cowers over their son on the left.
Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto
This dramatic and brilliantly colored canvas shows Spanish conqueror and explorer Hernando DeSoto, riding a white horse, the first European to view the Mississippi River, in 1541.
As De Soto and his troops approach, the Native Americans in front of…
Boone's First View of Kentucky
Daniel Boone is pointing out toward the west, and the future state of Kentucky.
The Promised Land-The Grayson Family
The people shown are the Graysons, and they were part of the great westward expansion of the United States during the mid-1800s.The Graysons traveled overland from Missouri to California in 1846, two years ahead of the Gold Rush that drew so many…
Coming of the White Man
A group of Native Americans view a ship with its sails for the first time.
Westward the Star of Empire Takes its Way
The railroad disrupts nature and bears down on the viewer, with the locomotive's light shining like a jewel. Wild deer scatter to the left, but the cleared field offers no refuge--the stumps, that catch the light of the west-setting sun, and the…