The Backwoods of America

When Cropsey painted The Backwoods of America, land across the country was being developed at an unprecedented pace. This idealized pioneer landscape depicts a remote homestead nestled along the shore of a wilderness lake. As the sun breaks over the mountains, a pioneer family begins its day. A woman stands in the doorway of a log cabin, her young children playing nearby, while her husband heads into the woods, shouldering a long-handled broadax and accompanied by a dog. A garden that includes the distinctly American pumpkin grows in roughly cleared patches along the forest's edge. As if forecasting the imminent end of frontier life, the artist signed his name on a rock resembling a tipped-over gravestone that soon will be covered by the cultivated pumpkin vines.