Burnham spent most of his life in the early, expanding West in Detroit, Michigan. He worked as sign painter as well as a popular artist of portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes like the Young Artist. Burnham did the Lewis and Clark Expedition from his imagination, and many of his works are stylized and idealized types of Americana. The charm of the young boy drawing on a beer barrel to delight his friends, an old woman, and an African-American child (perhaps a servant or a slave, it remains slightly unclear) suggests that this is what true American art is -- and should resemble (Thomas Mickell Burnham, 2009, Ask Art). Burnham was also fond of popular seascapes of ships and sailors, evidently culled from his memory growing up in Boston.

The value of this work is primarily to get a glimpse of what American popular art resembled, and how America saw itself...
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