Guides Through the Ages
This page will introduce guides in fact and fiction. The ways artists, writers and others depict guides may shed light on this craft.
This month we turn to paintings. Winslow Homer depicted guides in the Adirondack Mountains. He hired models that for him looked the part. . This painting is called “Two Guides” and shows the quiet side of the profession—people who seem more at ease on a mountain top than in any form of a crowd.
The second painting is a Frederic Remington called “The Scout: Friends or Foes”. It reflects a very consequential environmental scan and suggests that vision in guiding is literal as well as figurative.
Guides do not presume a constant environment and look for shifts and changes through the core trade of accurate and intense observation. They see a different view and remind us of the comment by Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscape, but having new eyes.”