Hidden Themes of Animal Captivity in Nineteenth Century American Paintings

Hidden Themes of Animal Captivity in Nineteenth Century American Paintings

Conflicting directions and influences were in play in American nation building toward the end of the nineteenth century, and those in power needed to convey a sense of control, security, and harmony due to white settler expansion, overhunting, and industrialization. One means of controlling the landscape was in removing free roaming animals from their natural habitats through means of captivity.

Similarly, animals were consequently removed as “subjects” in depictions of landscape, pastoral, and genre scenes. Paintings by Hudson River School artists such as Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole demonstrate this finding through pictorial devices known as empty signifiers and absent referents. Moreover, many artists integrated domestic rather than free roaming animals into wildlife landscapes as a means of depicting orderliness. These sublime but calculated paintings concealed rather than revealed, the pervasive eradication and horrific captive practices during a period known as Manifest Destiny.

Moreover, painters such as William Sidney Mount and Georg Caleb Bingham, depicted explicit images of animal captivity more broadly in American pastoral and genre scenes as nostalgic nods to an imagined arcadian past. Captive animals used for human labor and as pet companions in many of these works became veiled commodities for food, labor, and costume. This panel explores the captivity of farm animals as well as free roaming animals such as deer, squirrels, and foxes as well as the seemingly harmless paintings of gold fish bowls and birdcages within the themes of absence/presence-captivity/freedom and resistance/agency.