Lot Essay
In Attack on the Emigrant Train one finds a representation of America’s initial struggle towards Manifest Destiny, proof of a new demographic's hunger for images of an earlier time and evidence of the lineage of the newly developing artistic community in the West. The present work represents Thomas Hill’s appropriation of what became a principle myth of the American West, the attack by Native peoples on would-be settlers, that was originally made popular by celebrated early German-American painter Carl Wimar.
While Wimar’s original painting dated from a time closer to when the event might have taken place, Hill’s version, painted decades later, was likely designed to capitalize on an established Western audience that had an interest in subjects related to the earlier days of the region’s development. For the artist himself, Attack on the Emigrant Train likely marked his earliest foray into this new market, as it was “possibly Hill's first important painting after he moved to San Francisco from Philadelphia in 1861….[It] was one of his earliest western subjects and seems to have been the inspiration for his mature work.” (R. Stewart, J.D. Ketnerm A. Miller, Carl Wimar; Chronicler of the Missouri River Frontier, Fort Work, Texas, 1991, p. 68)
However, in its recollection of Wimar’s painting of 1856, the present work can also directly trace its lineage back to European art. European-trained Wimar actively observed and appropriated compositional elements from paintings, such as variations of The Massacre of the Innocents and Theodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, for his own uniquely American narrative subjects.
Wimar’s work served as the primary prototype for future depictions of the subject, only preceded by the frontier imagery of William Ranney, and was taken up by countless others, including Wimar's chief mentor Emanuel Leutze and illustrator F.O.C. Darley. In essence, such groundwork likely proved the basis for the visual representation of the attack on the covered wagon subject as carried on by Remington and Russell, and right on down through to the modern conceptualization of the subject in film.
While Wimar’s original painting dated from a time closer to when the event might have taken place, Hill’s version, painted decades later, was likely designed to capitalize on an established Western audience that had an interest in subjects related to the earlier days of the region’s development. For the artist himself, Attack on the Emigrant Train likely marked his earliest foray into this new market, as it was “possibly Hill's first important painting after he moved to San Francisco from Philadelphia in 1861….[It] was one of his earliest western subjects and seems to have been the inspiration for his mature work.” (R. Stewart, J.D. Ketnerm A. Miller, Carl Wimar; Chronicler of the Missouri River Frontier, Fort Work, Texas, 1991, p. 68)
However, in its recollection of Wimar’s painting of 1856, the present work can also directly trace its lineage back to European art. European-trained Wimar actively observed and appropriated compositional elements from paintings, such as variations of The Massacre of the Innocents and Theodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, for his own uniquely American narrative subjects.
Wimar’s work served as the primary prototype for future depictions of the subject, only preceded by the frontier imagery of William Ranney, and was taken up by countless others, including Wimar's chief mentor Emanuel Leutze and illustrator F.O.C. Darley. In essence, such groundwork likely proved the basis for the visual representation of the attack on the covered wagon subject as carried on by Remington and Russell, and right on down through to the modern conceptualization of the subject in film.