weak outline

The Weak Never Started (and it never ended either)

The perpetuation of western art in a Western discipline

It is almost pointless to comment on this, or any other…paintings of the West, for the simple reason that the works largely speak for themselves.[1]

J. M. Boundy’s The Weak Never Started (fig. 1) is one in a series of copies of the quintessential frontier image. It is my goal to address how and why the image of white pioneers defending themselves from an American Indian attack came to be accepted and exploited as the ideal American scene, in what ways it promotes the American self-image, for whose benefit this type of image is created, and where the western genre fits into the scheme of art history.

The Weak Never Started is a direct copy of a copy. The original painting designed with the same specific formal traits is Carl Wimar’s Attack on an Emigrant Train (fig. 2), painted in 1856. In 1860 or 1861, Wimar’s painting was made into a lithograph by Leopold Grozelier and published by J. H. Bufford as On the Prairie (fig. 3) for wide distribution. Judging from certain formal elements in the painting and from the likelihood of having ready access to a print easier than an original work, it seems certain that Boundy copied The Weak Never Started from Grozelier’s print.

In a shallow stagelike setting, The Weak Never Started depicts the peak of a battle between white pioneers in covered wagons and a band of Indian warriors on horseback. The wagon in the foreground exhibits minute detail in the grain of the wood, folds in the cloth, and placement of the large wheel. These details do not form a naturalistic whole, however. Rather, the wagon appears as an imagined construction unrelated to its surroundings. A line of covered wagons that diminish to a vanishing point follows to the wagon’s left. Schematically rendered, the background wagons exhibit no evidence of direct observation. In the background to the right a group of Indians on horseback wade through the long prairie grass to join the fight. Only the upper portions of these Indians and their horses are shown, creating the illusion of them floating in as a solid mass. Painted in clear, bright pastels, the sky is completely devoid of any clouds or variety. There is no movement in the grass, indicating the perfectly still atmosphere of a windless day or an indoor studio. Boundy depicted the buffalo bones in the right foreground in an unrealistical manner—they are too small, stylized, and in an unbelievable disarray with bones sticking upright as if defying gravity.

The figures in the painting are awkward and clumsy, their stances stiffly posed and poorly rendered. Carelessly drawn, the white characters who face the viewer do so with almost comic expressions. The misplacement of the two most prominent Indians in the background makes it appear as if one Indian is raising his hatchet for use on his own wounded tribesmember, when in fact, the narrative context makes it clear that the wounded Indian has been shot by a white man and the Indian with his raised hatchet is riding toward the covered wagon to fight the pioneers. The poses of the white men are less dynamic, and are therefore, considering the limited skill with which this work was painted, somewhat more believable than those of the Indians. What is more, the white characters wear more clothing and some of them are inside the wagon, hiding the imperfections in anatomical depiction that are so evident in the physique of the Indians. The figures who look the most realistic in their dynamic poses are the horses, although even in the original version this is probably the result of observation of other drawings rather than actual animals.

Wimar, Grozelier, and Bufford all enjoy the reputation of being outstanding in their fields. The Attack is evidence of Wimar’s mastery of the Düsseldorf technique to carefully depict landscapes and figures; his highly respected work influenced later prominent western artists.[2] Several writers about western art have projected that if Wimar had not died at such a young age he would have been considered one of the masters of the genre. Hoping to improve the status of American printmaking, Bufford’s lithography house brought over Grozelier from France precisely because his reputation was so great abroad.[3] Likewise, Bufford’s company was the foremost lithography house at the time On the Prairie was published.[4]

The Weak Never Started does not follow in this line of quality workmanship. Every attribute in the painting has significantly degenerated from Wimar’s rendition, although it does show certain attention to detail. All background information about Boundy and the Weak is lost, including its provenance and Boundy’s training, home town, and sex.[5] Not without openly admitted doubt, I have concluded that Boundy was a student or advanced amateur, studying from what was considered to be an important, patriotic work of art. For the facility of writing this paper, I will assume that Boundy is male, simply because painters of western subjects from this period are almost exclusively male. With little to go on in terms of Boundy himself, much of my analysis is based on the study of Wimar’s painting, but always with the understanding that Wimar’s work and his character are important because so many artists deemed his painting worthy to copy. Wimar becomes an icon, and it is his iconic status rather than his individual psychology which is a major focus of my study.

Boundy and Grozelier are not the only artists who found a source for their art in Wimar’s Attack on an Emigrant Train. Numerous artists in the nineteenth century directly copied and widely adopted the theme of the image. Wimar himself had made several versions of this theme before arriving at the final and most popular image of the Attack. From the Grozelier print, numerous artists were inspired to paint the same subject, including Felix O. C. Darley and Thomas Hill. Wimar’s painting also influenced his teacher from the Düsseldorf Academy, Emanuel Leutze, to use a similar design for his painting of a white-Indian confrontation on the frontier.[6] (figs. 4–6)

Artists use and re-use the narrative message of the Attack on an Emigrant Train because of its effective incorporation of several unifying concerns of white Americans.[7] A topic of endless scrutiny for nineteenth-century America was Manifest Destiny, which brought with it questions about treatment and attitude toward the Indians, and the realization of the limits to the frontier. The Attack addresses these matters in a reassuring, supportive way for the white Christian expansionist.

The image portrays a wagon train of white settlers defending their right to move west, extending civilization while claiming the land for themselves and their country, bringing with them technology, Christianity, and morality. The idea of Manifest Destiny gave Americans not only the right, but the obligation to expand westward. Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton was eloquently optimistic about westward emigration, stating, “It is the genius of our people to go ahead, and it is the practice of our government to follow, and eventually to protect and reward the bold pioneers who open the way to new countries, and subdue the wilderness for their country.”[8] The pioneers saw themselves missionaries or martyrs traversing the land for the benefit of their people, with no selfish motives implied. Common in western paintings, and overtly in Wimar’s 1854 version of the Attack, artists depict pioneers in stances associated with Christian icons.[9] Notably in that painting, Wimar modeled a wounded white man and the woman who tends to him on Michelangelo’s Pietà. Some pioneers intended not only to bring Christianity with them on their westward journey, but to leave it with the Indians they encountered along the way. Converting Indians to Christianity would civilize them, make them almost white, and render their conquering or removal unnecessary. With this in mind, the pioneers naturally considered themselves similar to the martyrs of ancient Christianity, who were also attacked by the unconverted.

The pioneers are in battle with a band of Indians, who take on the role of savage antagonists. “Such acts of aggression were to be interpreted as attacks on the progress of civilization itself.” Although there is the same number of fighters and wounded on each side, it is evident that the white settlers will prevail—they are armed with guns far superior to the hatchets and bows and arrows used by the Indians. “Images of pioneers staving off Indian attacks…offered some assurance that western pioneers would indeed resist savage life.”[10] Furthermore, the whites have two extra characters on their side—women caring for the wounded, showing the viewer that this is a family en route to its new home and not a group of heathen warriors attacking without provocation. Of course, the wagon train is perfectly innocent and justified in this image. It is the Indians who seem to initiate the attack on the docile and nonconfrontational pioneers. The painting adopts the white point of view, ignoring the fact that the Indians could instead be seen as defending their land from what they consider an invasion.

At the same time, the Attack recognizes the regrettable costs of westward expansion. In the foreground of the painting are buffalo bones, foreseeing the time when civilized cities drive the buffalo from its habitat and close to extinction.[11] Likewise, the inevitable white triumph over Indian attack illustrates one of many ways in which Indians were rapidly decimated during the time of westward expansion. Implicit in the picture, and known throughout America, is the fact that Indians were being conquered by force, civilization, and disease to the point that by the end of the nineteenth century their population had dwindled, some tribes entirely wiped out, and the remaining Indians lived their lives irrevocably changed from the ways of their ancestors as the result of white invasion.[12]

Patriotic Americans were to stoically endure the loss of the American wilderness and its native peoples as the necessary side effects of Manifest Destiny.[13] For American pioneers, the benefits of extending civilization were worth the dangers confronted when moving across country. All white Americans, not only those who chose to move out west, celebrated the spirit of courage and adventure. For those who remained in eastern cities, images such as the Attack allowed them to vicariously experience the freedom of the frontier without having to leave the comfort and stability of their homes. The vision of a wagon train full of American families moving westward gave proof of America’s progress, to be appreciated by all of its white citizens.

The Attack on an Emigrant Train adeptly answers this American desire to see itself as a rising nation, yet it does so not by mirroring reality, but by creating a myth of the pioneer experience. It was more important to show the essence rather than to record facts of the pioneer saga. The image is generalized and incorporates a multitude of historical inaccuracies. From the wagons themselves to the cloth of the Indian attire, the painting exhibits no evidence of first-hand exposure to actual western accouterments.[14] By the 1840s, Indians had adopted the use of the rifle, but the Attack shows them using primitive weapons. Furthermore, Indians picked their targets carefully; it was extremely rare for Indians to attack a long wagon train like the one depicted in Wimar’s image.[15]

In fact, Wimar did not paint the Attack from direct observation. Rather, the painting was inspired by a passage in a book, written by a French author, about California and Mexico, where Wimar had never been.[16] Wimar himself was not even in America when he made the painting—he was studying at the Düsseldorf Academy in Germany from 1852–56. Wimar was born and raised in Germany, not emigrating to America until the age of fifteen and then spent four years back in Germany for his studies, returning for only six more years until his early death at thirty-four. The Attack is the product of European imagination—even its reinterpretation into lithography was done by a French artist—yet it was presented in a narrative, documentary style and adopted by Americans as the quintessential reality of the American frontier experience.

The European fascination with the American west began long before Wimar. Numerous excursions into the American frontier by European explorers are well documented, such as the Prussian Prince Maximilian’s tour of the Missouri, accompanied by the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer. Adventures of the wild west were popularized in literature by James Fenimore Cooper, which was translated into several languages, and European authors such as Karl May, Balduin Möllhausen, and Gabriel Ferry. George Catlin, an early painter of western subjects, made a traveling show of his portraits of Indians which was popular throughout western Europe as well as America’s eastern states.

The European imagination was not only interested in learning about the American frontier, but in appropriating the manners of frontier life. For example, the German writer of the American experience Karl May was renowned for entrenching himself in the manners of the cultures that informed his stories. Upon his arrival in the United States, the young Karl Wimar himself changed his name to the anglicized Charles or Carl, and altered the pronunciation of his surname from the German sounding “Vee-mar” to “Why-mer” with a distinct American accent.[17] He adopted a manner of dress and demeanor that made him appear as an Indian, was referred to as “the Indian painter” during his schooling in Düsseldorf, and gave his daughter the Indian name Winona. (fig. 7)

The myth of Wimar as a true American artist is parallel to the accepted myth of his work as purely American images. Wimar was familiar with they myths of American characteristics—by the time he painted the Attack, he had lived in Saint Louis (which at the time might still be considered a frontier town), developed a rapport with local Indians, and had gone on an excursion up the Mississippi River. But his painting is not realistic; the Attack is rooted in the romantic fantasies of a European mind enchanted with the mythical freedom and adventure of the American frontier.

Despite its reputation as a global “melting pot,” America has since its inception exhibited a pronounced attitude of xenophobia. The white, English speaking portion of society dominates the social, political, and economic arenas of the United States, and did so as much in the nineteenth century as it does today. Assimilation is a matter of acceptance and success—without adopting an American demeanor, the immigrant remains a foreigner and always the “other.” German immigrants to America were quite willing to assimilate in the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by the measures undertaken by Wimar to seem purely American.[18]

Several writers have denied or chosen to ignore Wimar’s German heritage. As recently as 1977, Wimar’s questionable nationality has been a difficult issue to resolve. In his discussion of the artist, Peter Hassrick never mentions that Wimar was born and raised in Germany, only that he attended art school at the Düsseldorf Academy as was fashionable for American artists. “And though his lessons were German, Wimar’s subjects breathed the American spirit.”[19] In his 1881 biography of Wimar, William Romaine Hodges makes a clear distinction between the Americanized German artist and French fur traders. Wimar is treated as a fully American hero; his German heritage is all but negated. When Hodges quotes Wimar “in his own language,”[20] it is English, not German words which are reproduced. On the other hand, when referring to the French fur traders, he makes special note that they are “French, for although Americans by birth and an ancestry extending back through succeeding generations for more than a century, they still retained the language, traditions, and customs of the original settlers.”[21] To what degree was Wimar’s adoption of American mannerisms necessitated by his circumstance of being a foreigner in a land that might be more willing to accept him if he lost his Old World customs?

Despite its great nationalistic pride and a general feeling of uniqueness from Europe, America needed European talent and approval to lend legitimacy to its new western art. The western frontier provided the means for a reciprocal relationship between America and Europe, with each land exploiting the other for its own benefit. Europe used America as its own Garden of Eden to explore and provide a basis for its collective fantasies. “Life on the frontier, alas, was not so idyllic as popular images of western homesteading led the public to believe; but the accuracy of these images was probably seldom questioned, because they corresponded so well to the popular preconceptions of the West as the Garden of the World.”[22] With seemingly endless land, the frontier gave urban dwellers, first from Europe and then also from eastern states, the opportunity to explore nature, and then inevitably to conform it to the demands of civilization.[23]

America did not consider itself merely an extension of Europe, but a nation unto itself. America found that it could see itself most favorably through the vision of European art. So many of the celebrated western painters, in addition to Wimar, are European, including Karl Bodmer, Albert Bierstadt, Charles Schreyvogel, Thomas Hill, Rudolf Friedrich Kurz, Thomas Moran, and Henry Farny. American artists of the mid-nineteenth century commonly studied in Düsseldorf to learn European aesthetics with which to return to the United States. While there, Americans typically studied under Emanuel Leutze, who was regarded as “the American” despite being a native German and residing in Germany. With their European heritage and training, these artists possessed a commodity so valuable in the production of art—direct access to the Western tradition. America, while still developing its own aesthetic tradition, adopted these artists as its own thereby giving instant visible value to its native art, and more importantly, to what the art depicts—the richness of the landscape, morals of the people, and a mythic historical saga to claim for itself.

Labels of nationality served to classify individuals—to accept them as one of their own or to distance them as an “other,” depending on their usefulness to the groups in which they exist. This may explain why America was so eager to claim Leutze as its own, so willing to accept the art of Wimar as purely American. Insofar as they created favorable images of the American character, they were welcomed by the American mainstream culture as part of the makeup of that national ideal. People like the French fur trappers who were concerned only with their personal profit added nothing to the image of America as a home for moral, Christian families. Thus, they were considered outsiders while the patriotic artists were embraced. “Hardly any artist considered exploring the underside of the American character. An artist such as the politically radical Gustave Courbet is unthinkable in nineteenth-century America, since virtually all genre painters, like the landscapists, wanted to feel a part of the fabric of society.”[24] The Attack on an Emigrant Train so comfortably depicted the American self-image that not only did common citizens purchase it at an affordable price in its lithographic form, but Governor Gamble of Missouri acquired it for his private collection. Eventually, Wimar was commissioned to paint murals at the Saint Louis courthouse, officially representing the American subject and aesthetics.

The need to produce art that would be considered equal to the European example was so great that it became a business to import quality artists from Europe to make American art. Grozelier, the lithographer of On the Prairie, was one of those artists. “By the start of the Civil War the migration across the Atlantic had been so large, [Charles Hart, contemporary lithographer-turned-historian] remembered, that many ‘American’ lithographers ‘could not speak or understand English.’”[25] For lithography companies whose goal it was to market inexpensive reproductions of high quality art, the profit generated by the work of their foreign artists overshadowed the subjects of the art they distributed. But for the audience of such work, the only issue of importance was the message implied through the narrative lithographs, and as long as those lithographs depicted patriotic scenes, America’s interests were sufficiently represented.

Perhaps it was not such a difficult stretch for America to embrace European artists as representatives of itself. As a young nation, America was composed of primarily western European immigrants who could still easily trace their ancestry back to their homeland. Saint Louis, where Wimar lived, had a large German population, as did several other American cities, most notably Baltimore.[26] Furthermore, as white people, these European artists were united with native Americans in their defining of a common, visibly different “other,” the Indian. The common goal of Manifest Destiny also made the acceptance of foreigners by Americans more palatable.

There is an ongoing discussion in writings about American art as to what extent it relies upon the European tradition, or if America provides a new way of seeing, entirely divorced from the Western canon. Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis speaks to this, stating that Americans are Europeans transformed by the wilderness, and that the farther west they go, the farther from European influence, the more purely American they become. “Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”[27] That is, they have the artistic skill derived from the Western tradition, but apply it for such new subjects and different ends that they are completely unique from their European counterparts. In their books on American painting, Isham, Flexner, and Richardson tend to agree with Turner’s hypothesis. “Our major painters have not allowed nationalistic shame or nationalistic aggression to disturb their search for beauty.”[28] American art need not be insular; European style may influence the craft of American art, but native subjects account for an entirely American style. These theories defend America’s adoption of European artists.

On the other hand, certain writers deny European influence on truly American art. In “What is American in American Art,” Lloyd Goodrich states that “many of the strongest, most vital contributions had been made by native artists with no relation to advanced trends abroad.” He continues to list common traits that characterize American art, such as, “adherence to facts, avoidance of subjective emotion, directness and simplicity of vision, clarity, solidity, traditionalism.”[29] While these attributes describe the narrative, documentary style of the Attack, such seemingly objective traits serve to mythologize an invented history. Additionally, the Attack and other western paintings are clearly the results of European training. Therefore, Goodrich’s conditions for American style art do not reconcile with the western tradition. But western painting is so clearly an American phenomenon. Understanding this discrepancy, a reader might reject Goodrich’s claims. However, a viewer buying into the myth surrounding the western genre—that it shows the truth of American frontier life—would believe that Goodrich’s description applies completely to the Attack. Statements such as Goodrich’s propagate the myth of the frontier.

The majority of writers about the history of American art ignore the western genre. In his entire article, Goodrich devotes only one phrase to western painting, referring to “the hardy, adventurous existence of the Western pioneers,”[30] which he lumps in with genre painting. Flexner’s book contains two illustrations of Indian portraits, but his text does not discuss western or Indian paintings.[31] Baigell’s discussion of western painting is limited to post-Civil War work, when settlers had already domesticated the so-called wild west and artists depicted it in reverential, nostalgic tones.[32] Isham refuses to discuss American art with western subjects because he considers it to be of such low quality. “Their worst work, which is far commoner than their best, no sympathy can save… Even at their best they lacked the indefinable quality of style, inseparable from great painting.”[33] Strangely, Isham lists Hodges’ biography of Wimar in his bibliography, but never mentions him in the text of his book.

Writers who focus on western art tend to analyze the work for its narrative message and ignore its stylistic qualities. To a large degree, this tendency derives from the desire to understand western art as historical documents about America’s past and ideology. Isham’s dismissal of even the most renowned western painters as illustrators and not artists shows in what light western painting is often viewed—as documentation, historical truth, ethnographic study, geological report, or other factual representation. Therefore, viewers often judge western art by how accurately it portrays details of frontier existence.

Despite his success with his traveling Indian portrait gallery, Catlin has often been criticized for leaving his work undetailed or hastily rendered.[34] Such work is worthless except as it achieves verisimilitude to the Indian or other exotic findings from the American west. Concerns for accuracy led to criticism of the Attack on an Emigrant Train and other examples of Wimar’s early work. Herman ten Kale, a medically trained doctor, judges paintings of Indians for their ethnographic value in his article for Anthropos, an international but primarily European journal about anthropological study. “The thrilling scenes of the wild life in the former Far West called ‘Attack on an emigrant train,’ and ‘Indians pursued by American dragoons,’ both painted in Düsseldorf, show great defects in composition and perspective, and the drawing of some of the figures is very bad indeed. Ethnographical interest these pictures have hardly any.”[35] Disagreeing with Hodges’ assertion that Wimar was the best in his field and that his works with “an artistic disposition” are his best, ten Kale prefers Wimar’s later, more closely studied paintings, finding them to be “far better, not only in conception, composition, and technique, but also for their ethnographic value.”[36] At the same time, ten Kale admits that “an absolutely objective view of their art cannot be taken, for a verdict in this matter is largely a question of taste and fashion”[37] but neglects to mention his prejudicial view as a doctor and lack of training as an art expert.

Nineteenth-century art aficionados themselves objected to the lack of verisimilitude in Wimar’s early work. An anonymous writer in the Crayon criticizes the entire Düsseldorf Academy for its conventionalized, artificial view of the landscape. “…a landscape devoid of these qualities is a material landscape, destitute of all that is most glorious, entrancing, and elevating in Nature. This is the landscape-art of Dusseldorf [sic], and such is the price Nature extracts from those who betray her, and attempt to enslave her for their own purposes of self-aggrandizement and elevation—these picture makers.”[38] That “picture makers” is such a strong epithet for the Crayon critic betrays a taste opposed to academic work in the nineteenth century.

This leaves me to decipher the popularity of the Attack on an Emigrant Train. The comments above clearly reject the image for both its accuracy in ethnographic value and its overly academic depiction of landscape. Wherein lies its appeal? The Attack clearly spells out for its American audience, in no uncertain terms, that the American spirit will prevail, that the white American family is stronger than the Indian, the trials of an arduous journey, or nature itself. Its academic style aids the Attack in communicating its message as undeniable truth. Its repetition into the easily acquired print and countless later paintings, western movies, and other commonly seen visual information cements its reputation as the visualized American past. “Numerous representations of last-stand fights by different writers and artists suggested not only that such fights regularly took place (how could so many people be wrong?); more crucially, these paintings and stories suggested that they occurred in virtually the exact terms in which they were represented.”[39] To the nineteenth-century viewer, the Attack on an Emigrant Train displays not only the ideal American scene, but the true American scene. The nineteenth-century viewer accepted this image as reality because of its repeatedly reinforced narrative, precise and straightforward academic style, and finally, because it conformed to the progressive American self-image.

The Weak Never Started was part of the collection of C. R. Smith, lent to the Huntington Art Gallery in 1981 bequested to it upon his death in 1990. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Smith served as a daring and commercially innovative President and CEO of American Airlines from 1928 until 1974. (Fig. 8–9) Smith was a typical collector of western images—he was a wealthy businessman with an individualistic spirit and romantic ideas about the American past. His collection spans 150 years but the paintings are all stylistically quite similar. Smith was not interested in western paintings for any artistic merits, but as signifiers of information from a romanticized era in American mythology. He referred to the pieces in his collection as “things” and took advice on acquisitions from other businessmen or his celebrity friend Will Rogers rather than arts experts. His method of collecting has been paralleled to that of Thomas Gilcrease, whose collection formed the core of the Gilcrease museum, and who was known to purchase large collections of western art on a whim without scrutinizing the individual elements comprising the group.[40] Smith’s and Gilcrease’s western collecting peers have similar attitudes about their acquisitions—they buy what they like without regard for aesthetic quality, but with copious funds and business savvy. Collectors of western art tend not to collect other genres of art, much as museums segregate western art from their other work of the same era, and writers of American art have difficulties dealing with western art.

As western painting spans such a long era—from the mid-nineteenth century to the present—and does not neatly fit into stylistic categories, art historians often shy away from studying it. The writers on American art whom I have cited ignore the existence of western art to varying degrees, from Isham’s refusal to accept the western genre as genuine art, to Goodrich’s subclassifying it under genre painting, to the more common admission of the style’s existence and importance to American history, but unwillingness to formally analyze it. Even in the original catalog of C. R. Smith’s collection, aesthetics is a forbidden subject of discussion. Nicolai Cikovsky states in his introduction that it is “pointless to discuss the aesthetic merits of these works—not only is it merely beside the point, but it violates the spirit in which they were conceived and frame of mind received.”[41] Saunders’ 1988 catalog of C. R. Smith’s collection describes western art as objects which please collectors and as signifiers of historical values, but rarely discusses their aesthetic successes and failures. To illustrate, Saunders treats Boundy’s The Weak and Wimar’s Attack as virtually interchangeable in his analysis. He never addresses Boundy’s relative incompetence as a painter. For the main part, these factors leave western art to study by specialists in fields other than art history, such as American history or ethnography. What results is an unspoken refusal to admit western art into the scheme of Western painting.

Few authors have taken into account the pervasiveness of the western subject in American painting, and have been willing to discuss its stylistic concerns. Peter Hassrick attempts to prove that “Western art cannot be considered as a genre separate from the mainstream of American art…. The artists who created that corpus of work referred to as Western art were really part and parcel of the developing art of this nation. They were, in fact, much in accord with world art of their times, not proponents of a separate discipline.”[42] But the examples he uses prove that such artists do not correspond with their contemporary art movements—they are at least thirty years behind the time of stylistic groupings to which he assigns them, and even then their focus is evidently more oriented toward their narrative purpose than technique. Even Hassrick himself must agree that traditional western artists are not concerned with style, as he arranged his chapters according to thematic aspects of the narrative of western history, such as “Bridging the Continent,” “Evolving Frontiers,” or “The Quiet Passing.” However, his last chapter, entitled “A Painter’s World,” deals with artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, and John Marin, who, while using western subjects in their art, are defined by style and paint rather than any narrative story. Contradicting his earlier statement, Hassrick’s categorizing of western artists by whether or not they concern themselves with aesthetics confirms his sentiment that western art is in fact separate from other styles. In a similar vein, Patricia Janis Broder considers art of avant-garde artists who deal with western subjects to be western artists, but virtually ignores the traditional style of painting generally categorized as western.[43]

Although traditional western painting perhaps does not lend itself to analysis in the standard art historical methods, it still holds an undeniably valuable place in art history. The Weak Never Started is certainly a poorly executed work as far as connoisseurship is concerned in the scheme of Western painting, and in western painting as well. But regardless of its aesthetic failings, the Weak is an icon of nineteenth-century American ideology. It is the quintessential frontier image, and provides a glimpse into the values, goals, and beliefs of the world in which it was created.