Oil on canvas
Museum Purchase, The Philbrook Museum of Art,
Tulsa, Oklahoma
> Artist's biography |
This is the first of three canvases that Moran painted under the inspiration of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha
published in 1855.
Hiawatha supplied for the North American landscape a legendary hero, half man, half god, strongly
characterised humans and supernatural beings.
This canvas illustrates the episode in which Hiawatha shoots an arrow at the evil magician Megissogwon, as he sits in the
sky in his Shining Wigwam.
Moran brings out the mythical significance of the story by alluding to J M W Turner's Ulysses deriding Polyphemus
(now in the National Gallery, London), suggesting a parallel between the two bodies of legend, American and European. |
Room 8: The Great West
Thomas Moran (1837-1926)