American landscape. Land and its inhabitants

Thomas Cole · 1830

Cole visited Niagara in May 1829 and later composed an imagined autumn view. He omitted hotels, factories and viewing platforms. Concern about industrial development shaped that choice, which also concealed contemporary life. Two small Indigenous figures inhabit an idealised territory already altered by colonial dispossession.

Edward Hicks · ca. 1825

Hicks visited Niagara in 1819 but based this arrangement on an engraving published with a map in 1822. Painted verse presents the falls as evidence of divine greatness. Landscape and religious statement meet in the work of a Quaker minister.

Thomas Cole · 1836

The Connecticut River bend divides storm-darkened terrain from cultivated land. Cole included himself sketching. The museum discusses the view through settlement, environmental change and the displacement of Indigenous communities. A geographical outlook becomes a consideration of landscape transformation.

Thomas Cole · 1833

A gigantic goblet supports ruins and a miniature sea. Cole’s patron Luman Reed rejected the painting. Many interpretations have been proposed, but none explains it completely. Uncertainty belongs to the documented history of this imagined landscape.

Thomas Cole · 1842

Cole's series carries a person through four ages toward death and Christian salvation. Youth is the stage of hope and movement toward an imagined goal. The museum also offers a tentative reading in relation to a young America. The human religious journey remains the series' explicit foundation.

Asher Brown Durand · 1845

Durand chooses a vertical woodland view suited to close attention to trees, ground and changing light. The museum distinguishes its quiet, pastoral effect from Thomas Cole’s panoramic grandeur. American landscape painting developed through several different ways of presenting nature.

Frederic Edwin Church · 1857

Church combines the near and far sides of the falls into a view unavailable from one fixed human position. The viewer seems to hover over the torrent. Niagara was a symbol of American natural power and also a border near routes by which enslaved people sought freedom in Canada.

Frederic Edwin Church · 1859

Church synthesised studies from two Ecuadorian journeys under the influence of Humboldt’s ideas about connected natural zones. Visitors paid to see the canvas in a specially lit, window-like display and inspected details with opera glasses. Exhibition design made one painting a public event.

Frederic Edwin Church · 1857

Church travelled to South America inspired by naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s account of interconnected nature. He repeatedly painted Ecuador’s Cotopaxi volcano. This view was completed in his studio before a second journey. Scientific curiosity accompanied his religious understanding of nature as evidence of divine power.

Albert Bierstadt · 1863

Bierstadt developed this painting in New York after joining Frederick Lander’s survey expedition in 1859. An idealised Western landscape includes Shoshone figures. The museum connects this vision with settler expansion and its consequences for Indigenous communities.

George Caleb Bingham · 1845

The American Art-Union changed Bingham’s original title before distributing the work to an eastern audience. Still water and even light idealise frontier trade. The painting’s circulation helps explain the intended viewers of this calm image of Missouri life.

Jules Tavernier · 1878

Banker Tiburcio Parrott commissioned this Elem Pomo ceremony after witnessing it in 1876. Nearly one hundred figures occupy the roundhouse. Parrott also operated a mercury mine on ancestral Pomo land, complicating any claim that the painting is a neutral record of custom.

Robert S. Duncanson · 1871

Duncanson established his Cincinnati practice with patrons including abolitionists. The museum identifies him as the first Black American painter to study abroad and achieve international recognition. He also worked in Canada during the Civil War. This landscape belongs to his later career.

Robert S. Duncanson · 1867

Duncanson imagined this valley from Thomas Moore's poem Lalla Rookh. A courtly entourage accompanies the Persian princess's journey. Based in Cincinnati, he became one of the first African American painters recognized internationally. During the Civil War he lived in Montreal and contributed to Canadian landscape painting.

Sanford Robinson Gifford · 1862

Gifford presents Kaaterskill Clove and its distant falls in soft light. His view differs from earlier, more threatening treatments of the gorge. Expanding tourist infrastructure is largely omitted. Selection makes the landscape appear more secluded than its changing surroundings.

Frederic Edwin Church · 1860

Church painted this Maine landscape in his New York studio from studies made almost two years earlier. He exhibited the painting alone and promoted it in advance; hundreds came during its seven-week showing. Made on the eve of the Civil War, the blazing sunset permits a political reading, though no direct statement by the artist establishes one.

Winslow Homer · 1865

Army clothing identifies the reaper as a veteran returning to farming in 1865. Harvest allows hope for recovery, while the scythe retains its traditional association with death. Both meanings coexist in a painting made as the Civil War ended.

Winslow Homer · 1877

Preparing a costume recalls Jonkonnu traditions incorporated into Independence Day celebrations after emancipation. The painting dates to 1877, the end of Reconstruction and a retreat of federal protection for Black Americans’ rights. Festive preparation belongs to that difficult historical moment.

Thomas Eakins · 1871

Eakins began his rowing series after returning from Europe. The painting probably commemorates Max Schmitt’s victory in October 1870. Eakins also rows in the distance. Sport joins personal experience with his sustained study of bodies in movement.

Thomas Eakins · 1873

The painting records a race on Philadelphia's Schuylkill River in May 1872. John and Barney Biglin negotiate the difficult turn at the halfway marker while their rivals trail behind. The brothers won. Eakins, closely attached to his home city, prepared his compositions through detailed figure and perspective studies.

Winslow Homer · 1866

Homer began as a Civil War illustrator before turning towards outdoor oil painting. Croquet had recently arrived from Britain and become fashionable among prosperous Americans. Men and women play together here. Strong outlines and bright light turn observed leisure into a carefully organised scene.

Winslow Homer · 1873-1876

A boy controls the tiller of a small boat. Homer revised the arrangement, replacing one figure with an anchor. At the 1876 Centennial Exposition, critics associated the anchor and the child's forward gaze with hope for America's future after the Civil War. An everyday sailing scene received a national interpretation from its first audiences.

Winslow Homer · 1885

Homer’s stay in the English fishing community of Tynemouth changed his work. Afterwards he increasingly concentrated on the sea and those who laboured beside it. He painted this in Maine. Two fishermen unload a catch while balancing a small boat on the swell.

Winslow Homer · 1895; reworked by 1901

Two figures appeared on the rocks in the version exhibited in 1895. Homer later removed them and enlarged the spray. Revision changed the balance between people and sea. The surviving painting concentrates on waves, rocks and wind.

Winslow Homer · 1899; reworked by 1906

A man remains aboard a damaged boat surrounded by sharks and a waterspout. Sugarcane connects the scene with Caribbean plantation economies. The museum places the current within histories of trade, empire and slavery. Homer continued revising the canvas through 1906.

Winslow Homer · 1909

The title refers to shooting two birds in succession with a double-barreled gun. The weapon points toward the ducks and the viewer. Homer places the audience close to the instant of hunting. The late painting continues his attention to the sea and the sudden vulnerability of living creatures.

William James Glackens · 1905

Glackens painted his circle at a favourite New York restaurant. Jeanne Mouquin, the owner’s wife, sits with restaurateur James B. Moore. The painter’s wife Edith and critic Charles Fitzgerald appear in the mirror. Group portraiture meets observation of a social life organised around restaurants and evening gatherings.

Charles Sheeler · 1920

Sheeler based the composition on Manhatta, the film he made with photographer Paul Strand. The high viewpoint joins Lower Manhattan's buildings with the Church Street elevated railway. He removes small textures to concentrate on forms and shadows. Experience in film and photography passes directly into painting.