AA-2026-CA88BD
On the image
Somewhere in mid-century America, a tourist stopped to record a civic monument the way tourists of the 1950s always stopped — dutifully, from below, with the sky taking up more than half the frame — on the working theory that a great statue deserved a great deal of blue above it. The bronze rider wears a broad-brimmed hat of the kind that in American public sculpture reliably signals either a Civil War general or a frontier legend, both categories of man whom the town fathers of the postwar era were still eager to claim as moral ancestors. The stone plinth is solid and self-important, which is the correct register for a plinth, since its entire job is to communicate that whoever sits above it was worth the quarrying. What the snapshot captures without meaning to is the ritual of the American roadside pause — not quite sightseeing, not quite indifference — where the ordinary traveller documented civic grandeur the way a later generation would collect highway exits: compulsively, without retention.
Visually related — by likeness
Equestrian Monument, Broad-Brimmed Figure on Stone Plinth, 1950s USA. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-CA88BD. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/equestrian-monument-broad-brimmed-figure-on-stone-plinth-1950s-usa.
@misc{aaAA2026CA88BD,
title = {Equestrian Monument, Broad-Brimmed Figure on Stone Plinth, 1950s USA},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-CA88BD},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/equestrian-monument-broad-brimmed-figure-on-stone-plinth-1950s-usa}
}TY - ART TI - Equestrian Monument, Broad-Brimmed Figure on Stone Plinth, 1950s USA PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-CA88BD UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/equestrian-monument-broad-brimmed-figure-on-stone-plinth-1950s-usa ER -
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