Shooting the Beholder

Abstract

Charles Schreyvogel (1861–1912) produced some of the most visually striking paintings of the American West at the turn of the twentieth century. This essay explores the importance of guns and shooting in structuring Schreyvogel’s art, within and beneath manifest narrative content or iconography. Often pointed directly at the beholder or placed in striking angles and directions, guns in his paintings do more than reconstruct the mythic history of Western conquest. Schreyvogel deployed the gun as a powerful visual device that dramatized that history in new ways while advertising his knowledge of military weapons and marksmanship. As an organizing motif, the gun also helped Schreyvogel make his otherwise traditional realism unusually eye‐catching to modern viewers at a time of personal financial distress and changing fortunes for academic oil painters generally. In a marketplace of imagery increasingly saturated with and transformed by new media, Schreyvogel shrewdly adapted oil painting to new conditions of pictorial production and spectatorship. With its close juxtaposition of the pistol barrel and eye of an aiming cavalry trooper – metaphorically equating seeing with shooting – Schreyvogel’s painting Breaking Through the Line epitomizes his contribution to a broader, modern discourse that the author calls “gun vision.”

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