2020.14
The Log Hut
Artists
Anna L. Payson Skillings
(1825 – 1905);
[
after
Charles Codman (Chas. Codman)]
Title
The Log Hut
Creation Date
1857
Century
mid-19th century
Dimensions
25 x 35 in. (63.5 x 88.9 cm)
Classification
Paintings
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
oil on canvas
Credit Line
Gift of Glenn B. Skillin, Kindness of E. Christopher Livesay
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
2020.14
The rise of art education in antebellum America provided new opportunities for women, including Ann L. P. Skillings. A native of Portland, Maine, she early earned recognition as “an industrious, studious and promising artist.” Likely inspired by artists of the Hudson River School, she traveled in upstate New York where this landscape, the only known surviving example of her work, was painted. Skillings depicts a modest homestead with cows situated in the midst of an undeveloped landscape. This implicit suggestion of ineluctable western expansion—or “Manifest Destiny”—testifies to a sharp contrast in perspectives on the land held by many Euro-American “settlers” and indigenous inhabitants of the region, including the Onondaga and Seneca. Rather than seeking to “tame” the “wilderness,” these Native nations embrace a sense of reciprocity with the natural world, as expressed through their cultural animism and spirituality. Such an alternate perspective fails to register in this canvas.