Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism

A new look at French Orientalism’s influence on the art of the American West, showing how aesthetics and ideology jointly informed approaches to colonialism and expansion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in both France and the United States

From the 1830s to the 1920s, American artists such as Alfred Jacob Miller, George de Forest Brush, Joseph H. Sharp, Bert Geer Phillips, and Ernest Blumenschein traveled to France to study their craft. Returning from abroad, these artis...