Existing comment:
Defeat
Panel 9, 1954
This painting likely references the Americans' defeat by the British at Philadelphia in September 1777 and George Washington's failure to recapture the city. The visual field of packed snow and ice links that defeat to the Continental Army's December retreat to Valley Forge, about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia, and to the six months of tremendous hardships endured at the encampment. Lawrence symbolizes the toll of these military setbacks by clustering the cloaked and bloodied figures in the background and turning them away from us -- drawing our attention to the gruesome scene in the foreground. There lies an incompletely covered "dying horse," as Lawrence wrote on the back of this panel. He has extended the experience of struggle to animals.
Throughout the series his depictions of suffering animals -- horses, elk, birds, and oxen -- as well as delicate flora reveal the value he placed on tending to the environmental implications of struggle. |