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"Poor White Folks" and "Western Squatters": James Henry Beard's Images of Emigration

Western Squatters (detail), 1850. Oil on canvas, 62 x 80 in. DePauw University Permanent Art Collection, Greencastle, Indiana, Gift of John Kinsey By the middle of the nineteenth century, scenes like William S. Jewett's The Promised Land (fig. 1) exalted the natural bounty of the United States and encouraged its people to travel a glorious westward road to national prosperity. As Patricia Hills has observed, the painting reconstructs the moment when the apparently genteel and virtuous Grayson family brought the promise of civilization and its ultimate rewards into America's fertile California wilderness.' The image reinforces the ideological underpinning of westward expansion, arguing in favor of what many antebellum Americans perceived as the nation's providentially ordained millennial mission and its leading role in the continuous progress of civilization. What, then, does a painting like James Henry Beard's Western Squatters (fig. 2), also produced in 1850, say about American mission and American progress?2 It, too, depicts an emigrant family at rest in an American landscape. Both scenes recall the Holy Family's Flight into Egypt; like Saint Joseph leaning on his staff, both fathers support themselves on their rifles. They stand in the center of their respective compositions, while the women and children placed around them form the bases of stable triangles. But there, any similarities between Jewett's celebratory Promised Land and Beard's dispirited Western Squatters seem to end. While Jewett's Mr. Grayson scans the expansive landscape from an exalted height, Beard's slovenly, bare-chested father stares fixedly at the ground, apparently unaware of the pile of game at his feet. His wife, too, takes no notice of the natural glory in which she sits. Her overall lassitude bespeaks complete exhaustion, and she stares up at her husband with a questioning expression, as if trying to gauge his faith in their ultimate survival. Her loose-fitting dress hangs immodestly open at the bodice; she, unlike the straitlaced Mrs. Grayson, is no model of middle-class virtue and moral rectitude. The squatters' three shabbily dressed children-the boy taking a deer from the back of the horse, the young girl by her mother's side, and the little child in a torn shift-are hardly evidence of parental industry. Scholars have noted the dispirited aura of Beard's painting, an aura at variance with the hearty mood of most midnineteenth-century American images of westward migration or of American genre painting in general.3 Even when compared to George Caleb Bingham's The Squatters (fig. 3), the general air of disorder permeating Beard's image is evident. The now-idle men of Bingham's family were robust enough to construct a