“The Last of James Fenimore Cooper”
Performed by Brent Michael Davids (Mohican/Munsee-Lenape) with Miro Quartet
“The Last of James Fenimore Cooper”
Brent Michael Davids (Mohican/Munsee-Lenape) Performs “The Last of James Fenimore Cooper,” 2001.
Thomas Cole (American, born in England, 1801-1848). Daniel Boone at His Cabin at Great Osage Lake, 1826. Oil on canvas. Museum Purchase.
This painting by Thomas Cole was paired with Brent Michael Davids’ performance of his score The Last of James Fenimore Cooper. Cole’s painting represents an elderly Daniel Boone, mythologized for exploits that were buoyed by a belief in the divine right of white Americans to expand their control over the land and deny the histories and presence of Indigenous people already living there. Romanticized ideas of frontiersmen like Boone were popularized through literature and imagery that circulated through print in the nineteenth century. Among such literary works was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), which was set in the mid-eighteenth century.
“The Last of James Fenimore Cooper,” Brent Michael Davids (Mohican/Munsee-Lenape). Copyright ©2001
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