The Last of the Mohicans
Artist: Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (German-Born American, 1816-1868)
Date: 1850
Collection: American Museum of Western Art, Denver, Colorado, United States
Description
This painting depicts a scene from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. This book became symbolic of Euro-Americans’ perceptions of and feelings toward Native Americans at the time. From when the book was published in the 1820s through the time when Leutze painted this in 1850, Native Americans were being relocated away from their ancestral homes to the West in order to accommodate a growing Euro-American population. Many Euro-Americans at the time considered Native American cultures to be noble and traditional, and feared they were quickly becoming extinct.
The artist, Emanuel Leutze, spent much of his career creating a grand narrative painting tradition of the Americas. His work highlighted key events in history and episodes from American literature.
