Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap — Using Biblical and classical imagery to justify and heroicize westward expansion, Bingham portrays Rebecca Boone in the pose of a Madonna, a popular domestic ideal of the time, and she is completed in interpretive ways with a faithful hunting dog and her husband leading a noble charger. She represented all pioneer women who by the mid-nineteenth century were idealized and celebrated.
Photo Credit: By George Caleb Bingham - 1852 - Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23197838