Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Preview image of work. oil on canvas, The Log Hut 39357

2020.14

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The Log Hut

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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.