John Gast: American Progress

In 1872 a publisher named George Crofutt commissioned a painter in Brooklyn to come up with an illustration he could use as a frontispiece for a series of travel guides. John Gast was a Prussian immigrant himself who had grown up in St. Louis, Missouri, then at the frontier of the North American West for European Americans, so he had some cultural experience with the ideals Crofutt wanted depicted. Crofutt’s travel guides were published under the title Western World, further defining the subject of the work. The painting Gast came up with, American Progress, was so popular with Crofutt’s readers that he reproduced it as a large chromolithograph, or color print, for his subscribers so they could frame it and display it in their homes