Dear Artists,

I went to the Denver Art Museum this weekend, and it’s one of my favorite places. When you walk into the building, you can see the whole world and the whole history of the world on canvas, in bronze, and on paper.

Art is not just pretty pictures of the world. Art is about people’s ideas of the world. Art doesn’t just tell us what people saw; it tells us what people thought. So when I see this painting of Long Jakes by Charles Deas, I don’t just get to see what Mountain Men looked like. I see what people like Charles Deas thought of Mountain Men at the time he painted it.

Sincerely,

Mr. Heimbuck