A prairie gallery

 

I'm guessing he knew it was a big deal, but what he didn't know was how big. I can't imagine that this man, out on what he considered his land, behind his own team of oxen--I'm guessing he understood that he was transforming the world, opening up the ground, turning it productive, making a place for himself, his family, and his dreams. He couldn't be blind to changing the world.

But he's not at the heart of things. Up close, he's a fortress of a guy, broad-chested, tall and lean, huge arms. What he's doing dominates the painting, but even his plowing seems part of the setting. Dunn loves the dog. In some ways, he's the focal point, carefree, romping through the uncut prairie grass, content simply to be out in a big world of the plains. The buffalo skull is deliberately hidden, as if Dunn didn't want it to get too much attention. 

But that skull is the key to Harvey Dunn's interest, I think, because that buffalo skull testifies to what once was, to what is being transformed, both what's left behind and what's lost. That's the bigger story, the one the strapping farmer/rancher only partially understands. He knows his story, and it's big. What he doesn't see--maybe that's why Dunn partially covers the skull--is the real story--immense change, a world forever altered by a single-bottom plow and the hard-working white man behind it.

What Harvey Dunn, as well known as any American illustrator, wanted to do with his life and work after his experience in war was paint big, paint huge, paint something more appropriately scaled to the whole human enterprise. He didn't want to stylize a short story, pretty-up the cover of a magazine, or use his brushes to sell anything, not even automobiles. He kept illustrating, but the war taught him something abiding about the human character and broad drama of life itself, and when he couldn't finish all those sketches he made during the war, he turned to a world he may not even have thought of before he left for Europe. He turned for inspiration to his own epic childhood on the prairie.

He wasn't alone. No less a figure than Teddy Roosevelt found something that left him in awe in big skies and endless horizons. When Willa Cather left Red Cloud, Nebraska, she never became homesick enough to take up residence back there again, but neither could ever leave totally. When a friend and fellow writer suggested that she begin telling the stories of her childhood out in a world not unlike the one being plowed in Dunn's painting, Cather began a writing life that centered right there.

After the war, Harvey Dunn stumbled back home and spent years there, even though he only visited occasionally. His heroes, understandably, are often women. 

Here she sits, her baby on a blanket surrounded by a gallery of chickens, the sod house almost welcoming, sunflowers thoughtfully watching her, not the sun behind them. The dog stands guard. If you follow the stream of chickens all the way back, Dunn celebrates the family's successes by including a ramshackle barn to illustrate clearly how things have improved. The sky is a sea of cotton. Even the baby seems entranced by the huge sky she's only beginning to see.

This prairie Madonna sits beside her husband as a oxen rest in the background, having made it up a long hill above the river beneath. His eyes are on the horizon. He's still planning out the route to where he needs to go. She tends to a baby so young it almost certainly had to have been born aboard the schooner.

Even here, where the would-be settlers dominate the canvas, it's the land itself, the setting of the story that is the story, this wide forever-land.

Here, Dunn puts a neighbor far off in the distance, a half mile away from her place, their place, which is likely behind us--it's where she's going. But for purposes of this portrait, the homestead isn't of great interest. What is a tall and strong and beautiful woman who will never, ever be a cowboy, even when she spends her afternoon like a cowpoke. Her wrestling cattle isn't the story. What Dunn can't stop painting is her world, her new huge world. She's barely a settler.

Even here in the fearful darkness a few seconds before a storm that may well blow them all away, she may well be in the center of the canvas, but the world where she lives is the story's real protagonist.

I've always felt, well, proud of the fact that Willa Cather's best work are two novels all about the prairie world she grew up within, My Antonia and O, Pioneers! Just as I am proud of the plain and simple fact that when Harvey Dunn returned from war he looked back to the plains as a place he could do what his artistic soul had begun to tell him to do, to paint the big picture.