Progress (The Advance of Civilization) (Primary Title)
Asher B. Durand, American, 1796 - 1886 (Artist)
One of the most canonical pictures by a member of the so-called Hudson River school of landscape painters, Asher B. Durand’s Progress points to several aspects of cultural and social history, including ecology, Native American policies, and railroads and the Industrial Revolution. Offsetting the locomotive, canal, townscape, and the log cabin at right, the Native American presence (relegated to the left foreground) reminds us of the sacrifices engendered by the “advance of civilization.”
Progress was commissioned by financier, industrialist, and collector Charles Gould, who shortly thereafter became broker and then treasurer for the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. Gould did not dictate the style or subject matter of Progress, but he was one of many antebellum patrons who commissioned art, preserving in paint the kind of landscapes threatened by their own interests in locomotive industries.
The Railroad in the American Landscape: 1850–1950, The Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, Mass., April 15–June 8, 1981.
American Dreams: Paintings and Decorative Arts from the Warner Collection, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, September 20, 1997–January 2, 1998
Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, Brooklyn Museum, March 30–July 29, 2007; Smithsonian American Art Museum, September 14, 2007–January 6, 2008; San Diego Museum of Art, February 2–April 27, 2008
Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 30–May 13, 2018; Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire [exhibition title in London], National Gallery of Art, London, June 11–October 7, 2018
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