I recently took advantage of a gloomy late-winter afternoon to meander around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was quickly reminded that the veritable cultural institution is not for the faint of heart. Last year, the Met’s two locations (the Cloisters, located in upper Manhattan, is exclusively dedicated to works from the Middle Ages) welcomed 5.5 million visitors. It felt like they were all there on this particular Saturday. Fear not, I soldiered on, map and app in hand.
I didn’t expect such a visceral reaction when I encountered Edward Hicks’ 1847 painting “Penn’s Treaty,” a revisionist depiction of the legendary meeting between William Penn and the Lenni Lenape people on the Delaware River in 1682. I uttered what the fuck?! under my breath, catching the raised eyebrow of a nearby security guard.
Given what we know about the decimation of North America’s Indigenous people, a peaceful treaty signing seems highly unlikely. Hicks based his painting on a work by Benjamin West, thus perpetuating the mythological establishment of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
To the Met’s credit, the work’s placard makes note, stating, “Hicks similarly mythologized the benevolent nature of this encounter, erasing the coercive and violent realities of colonization.”
If there’s a time to be reading the writing on the wall, this is it.
1MC Takeaway
If you visit the Met this spring, “Casper David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” showcases the artist’s prolific contributions to the German Romantic movement. I had never heard of him, either, but was mesmerized by his use of the painting style rückenfigur, in which the artist portrays their subject from the back, leaving the facial expression open to interpretation. Who doesn’t love a little mystery?
For more on rückengfigur and modern interpretations, read my recent article for Queerty.
