American Painting and Sculpture

WILLIAM TYLEE RANNEY
(American, 1813-1857)

First Thoughts of “Boone’s View of Kentucky”, about 1849
Graphite on paper
Museum purchase 1961.7

Born in Connecticut, William Tylee Ranney began working as an artist in New York at the age of twenty. Although he was also a portrait painter, many of Ranney’s artworks depicted historical subjects that attested to the growing sense of nationalism prevalent in America during the mid-1800s.

Ranney executed this drawing as a preliminary study for two oil paintings that depicted Daniel Boone and his team of explorers as they crossed the Cumberland Mountains into Kentucky. A national hero in the nineteenth century, Daniel Boone came to symbolize the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the belief that Americans were divinely ordained to populate the entire continent.