America's Wilderness

While for example Leutze's "Cortez" seems still a kind of European history painting, this one has already something typical American.

It depicts the Spanish conquistador Ponce de Leon in Florida and is by the American painter Thomas Moran (1837-1926). Moran was a member of the Hudson River School and more a landscape than a history painter. But therefore and because he was deeply impressed by the dense forests of north Florida, he was able to show the forsakenness of this little group of Europeans in that enormous wilderness. This was something that you couldn't learn on the European academies.

Ponce de Leon in Florida (1878)