John Gast (painter)

John Guest ( born December 21, 1842 in Berlin, † unknown) was an American painter and lithographer.

Life

Little is known about his life coming from Prussia Guest. According to information issued on July 23, 1867 his passport, his father Leopold was a guest also worked as a lithographer and moved with his family to the United States when the son was about four years old. While Leopold can be detected as an artist in St. Louis, Missouri, John worked most of his life in Brooklyn, New York, where he is still occupied for 1880 in the records of the United States Census. After that date can be no more show information.

Work

Although the majority of guest artistic work consists of lithographs, he achieved international fame mainly through a painting. In 1872 he made ​​on behalf of the publisher George Crofutt on an oil painting, which he first named Westward Ho / Manifest Destiny was that now as American Progress ( American Progress) is known, however. The picture is symbolic of excessive colonization of the American West as a civilization dar. - religious task of the settlers in allegory to Manifest Destiny

Corfutt, who published a series of travel guides, took on not only a print of the painting in one of his books, but also produced an enlarged chromolithograph of it to his subscribers. Thus, the painting was soon in print and the best-known visualization of Manifest Destiny

At the present time the image statements be included rather critical. Thus, the historian Amy S. Greenberg calls the representation of the settlers " smug and self-righteous ," the sociologist Wulf D. dog sees " cultural chauvinism ". In particular, the representation of Native Americans as repressed by civilization is a cause for criticism.

In 2000, the plant was in a selection of 120 paintings and sculptures in the exhibition The American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality in the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, at the Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, and were shown at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

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