When I was in ninth grade, my class went on a field trip to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. I followed my teacher into the museum as I had once followed my parents into other formal settings --reluctantly. I felt claustrophobic, as if the room was airless and the walls were pressing in upon me. I just wanted to be outdoors in the Berkshire Mountain countryside. I've been to museums. Let me out!
At the Clark there were paintings by Goya and Turner, Corot and Cassatt. The docent spoke about the Barbizon School, but I paid scant attention. And while some of the paintings were colorful and beautifully crafted, the rest seemed to lack worthwhile subject matter. Surely life held more interesting topics than Sargent's Portrait of Carolus-Duran, or Renoir's The Onions.
I shook my head and moved on down the corridor to another collection, and when I looked up it was as if someone had suddenly snapped on the lights in a darkened room.
The painting was by an artist named Frederick Remington, and it showed a lone American Indian on horseback on a cold snowy night somewhere in the wild heart of the Great Plains. Although the scene was nocturnal, the man and his horse cast a sharp moonlight shadow upon the snow. Both man and horse peered at the twinkling lights of campfires in a wooded draw some snow-covered miles away. The man leaned slightly forward at the waist, and he held his rifle at the ready across his saddle. His horse stood tense and ready, and his ears pointed sharply towards the distant fires as he listened closely while exhaling a cloud of frosty breath. What on earth...?
I moved closer to the painting and looked at the title. It was called The Scout: Friends or Enemies? I stepped back slightly and studied the man's fringed skin jacket and his fur hat with a single eagle feather. His ocher blanket was fastened around his waist by a cartridge belt. His face was unafraid, yet revealed nothing. And then I looked where the scout was looking, at the yellow campfires twinkling in the cottonwood draw.
Are they his people? What if it's Custer and the Seventh Cavalry? How can he tell from here?
It was clear that whatever the scout did next would determine whether he lived or died. I felt as if I were watching a drama unfold, and that everything in the painting -the man's clothing, the horse's stance, and the way the moonlight reflected off the endless snowy plains-was crucial to the tale. The painting was so authentic. The sharply rendered details gave me confidence that the story was true. It was as if Remington had been there.
At the Clark I was also introduced to, and captivated by, the work of Winslow Homer. Homer's work also showed an intimate, first-hand knowledge of the American wilderness and the men and women who lived on the land. For a long time I stood before Two Guides, a painting that showed two Adirondack Mountain guides carrying axes and standing among freshly cut trees on a warm summer day. The older guide was pointing out something in the distance. I wanted to hear what the older guide was saying, and see what he was pointing towards.
Here on canvas was exactly what I wanted to experience and understand. Looking at the paintings, I sensed that both artists had spent much of their lives outdoors. Surely they had known the crunch of new snow under their boots, felt the sting of salty spray in their eyes, smelled the sweat of men and horses after a long hard ride, and thrilled to the electric impulse of a line going tight to a leaping trout. With their depictions of agate-eyed cavalrymen charging across the sun-scorched plains, of guides and woodsmen in the forests and lakes, of hunters and trappers in the mountains, of men and women of all backgrounds hard at work on the American land, I knew Remington and Homer would teach me a great deal about the America I wanted to know.
American art is about telling the American story. As art historian Robert Hughes writes, "Americans, like any other people, inscribe their histories, beliefs, attitudes, desires and dreams in the images they make."