Home by the Lake

Church's Home by the Lake presents an optimistic view of America's future. An industrious pioneer couple has carved out a modest homestead in the wilderness, where nature provides for their material needs. The woman carries water drawn from a stream-fed cistern while her husband hunts on the lake. A freshly killed deer in his boat suggests the availability of nourishing game. Tree stumps near the cabin testify to the physical labor involved in settling the wilderness, but the wood has been reclaimed as shelter.

By the 1850s, debates over the spread of slavery into the American West threatened the Union. Church's pioneers represent the small-scale yeoman farming of his native New England rather than the South's slave-based agriculture. Cleared fields extending to the horizon, suggesting that numerous enterprising families have settled the area, perhaps indicate the artist's hope that the West would follow the pattern of the free labor Northeast.