Franconia Notch, New Hampshire 1872

William Trost Richards made this watercolor painting of Franconia Notch in New Hampshire. With its sublime mountain vista and lone figure, the image creates meaning through visual codes that associate the American landscape with spiritual experience and national identity. During the mid-19th century, paintings such as this served a social function in promoting the idea of manifest destiny – the belief that white Americans were divinely entitled to expand their dominion across the continent. Artists of the Hudson River School and others, effectively aided that project by producing idealized views that encouraged settlement and resource extraction, while simultaneously eliding the presence of Native Americans. To fully understand this painting’s place in cultural history, you might research period guidebooks, maps, and promotional literature. Art is not simply a reflection of nature, but something deeply contingent on social and institutional context.