The Coming of the White Man

The English-born Joshua Shaw immigrated to the United States in 1817 at the recommendation of prominent American expatriate artist Benjamin West. Shaw became one of America's earliest landscape painters, frequently depicting the arrival of the first white settlers in the new world in works such as the present example. Artists of the period commonly produced variations on this theme as part of the mid-19th century demand for romanticized depictions of interactions between Native Americans and settlers.