Corey Piper

Hunting and its aftermath formed a major theme in nineteenth-century American art, appearing in natural history illustrations, grand paintings of human-animal combat, popular prints, and other visual media. This dissertation approaches the art of the hunt from a social as well as an ecological perspective, interrogating how hunting and its representations structured human relationships to the natural world, contributed to the process of national identity formation, and furthered a range of political and social ideologies. Rather than an exhaustive survey of hunting in American art, I examine hunting imagery through three distinct interpretative frames: animal killing and representation as a foundation of American natural history, hunting’s role in picturing Western expansion, and hunting imagery as a means of masculine performance and elite cultural ritual. This thematic approach puts key artists— including Charles Willson Peale, John James Audubon, George Catlin, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins—in dialogue with each other to investigate how artists forged a coherent national identity through the development of shared cultural practices of humans’ dominion over nature. This analysis reveals deeper insights into the social history of the United States by considering how the art of the hunt served to legitimize social hierarchies, justify the displacement of people, and model elite forms of behavior. This dissertation also provides a new perspective on Americans’ historical relationship to nature, by demonstrating how nineteenthcentury Americans employed hunting imagery to rationalize and even celebrate ecological and environmental destruction.