Knowledge Box

Francis Davis Millet’s The Expansionist (The Traveled Man): The Personification of Columbia in American Political Discourse and Art

HSB 201

Francis Davis Millet’s painting The Expansionist (The Traveled Man), 1899, depicts an Elizabethan parlor filled with relics from Asia. Dominating the right side of the composition is a young woman, clothed in white and blue, carefully poised and gracefully depicted. This image evokes the analogous ideas of manifest destiny and imperialism in American discourse that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Many works by American artists produced before and during the Spanish American War evoke the nation’s economic and political motivations for expansion. America’s annexation of the Philippines after the war allowed for increased military presence in China and fair competition for trade amongst world powers. Artists often turned to Columbia, the female personification of the United States, as a symbol of national pride for military expansionism. While previous scholarship has shown the pertinence of Columbia in late nineteenth-century American art, scholars have not yet defined the relationship between representations of Columbia and manifest destiny. In Millet’s painting the woman serves as a representation of Columbia and is presented in a passive manner which differs from previous inspirational depictions of this figure in earlier decades. His depiction of this woman in a room congested with Asian mementos signifies the prevalence of manifest destiny and imperialist ideology in the expansion of American territories. In this paper I will argue that Francis Davis Millet’s The Expansionist (The Traveled Man) serves to critique American culture’s ethnocentric ideas encompassing nineteenth-century expansionism through imagery of Columbia.