American Masterworks from the Corcoran Collection: Now on View

The successful Philadelphia portrait painter John Neagle received one of the most important commissions of his career in 1842, when Whig Party members requested a full-length likeness of their presidential candidate Henry Clay (The Union League of Philadelphia). To execute the portrait, Neagle traveled to Frankfort, Kentucky, where he received additional commissions including this painting of Clay’s fellow Kentuckian Richard Mentor Johnson (1780-1850).  Like Clay, Johnson served in both houses of Congress; he also served as the ninth Vice President of the United States in the administration of Martin Van Buren (1837 to 1841).

The son-in-law and student of Philadelphia painter Thomas Sully, Neagle displayed the same bravura brushwork as his mentor. Dazzling strokes define Johnson’s trademark red waistcoat, shiny silk cravat, ruddy complexion, and the breeze-blown gray curls that frame his pensive face. They also enliven the dense, lush trees edged in fall foliage, whose crimson color echoes that of Johnson’s vest. Neagle’s choice of a landscape background, rather than a studio setting, was relatively unusual for portraiture during this era.

Little is known about this handsome portrait except that it was painted by the English-born Joseph Blackburn. The painting’s sitter and place of execution are unidentified, and its circa date is based on costume and the work’s relationship to other oils by the enigmatic Blackburn, who worked in Bermuda, New England, and Britain. Supporting the painting’s possible English origin are two facts: its first recorded appearance was in that country about 1956, and it bears a relatively large signature characteristic of Blackburn’s work there.

The lavishly attired gentleman strikes a formal pose in a dark interior enlivened by a blue drapery at the right and a window featuring an elaborate volute at the left. His rosy cheeks and the tricorner hat he grasps in his right hand suggest that he has just returned from a sunset stroll. The brown coat sports an unusual scalloped cuff, a style called à la marinière or mariners’ cuff which was quite fashionable in England from at least the 1730s into the 1760s. The man’s left hand, placed assuredly on his hip, draws this coat as if to show off the sumptuous waistcoat and gold watch fob underneath. The garment’s light blue silk is accented by a delicate loom-woven subpattern and elaborate silver embroidery. Blackburn rendered this clothing in such remarkable detail that he must have worked from actual garments.

The lack of information about this portrait, along with the fact that nothing is known of Blackburn’s birth, early work, or training—which must have been with a professional English portraitist—suggest that he is an artist awaiting further study.

Before achieving fame in the 1840s as the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse was a portraitist of some renown. He sought to cement his reputation as a painter by attempting a grand work of historical significance: The House of Representatives. The foundation for such lofty ambition was laid when he studied at London's Royal Academy of Arts, where painters were taught to execute epic pictures that could edify their audiences. Upon his return to America, Morse chose the chamber of the lower body of the United States Congress in session at the US Capitol—a place unseen and unvisited by most Americans in 1822—as his subject for this monumental undertaking.

Arriving in Washington, DC, in November 1820, Morse worked 14 hours a day for four months in a temporary studio adjacent to the House chamber, which recently had been rebuilt after the Capitol was destroyed by fire during the War of 1812. His massive canvas included careful renderings of architecture and people, including Congressmen, staff, Supreme Court justices, and press. In the visitors' gallery at the far right is Pawnee Indian chief Petalasharo, and on the left, Morse's father, Reverend Jedidiah Morse. Rev. Morse was in town to report on Indian affairs to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, one of the giants of American political life before the Civil War and a leading defender of slavery.

Ultimately, Morse created a picture of the House of Representatives not as it was, but as he wanted it to be. At a time when the House was often raucous and factional—debating major legislation such as the Slave Trade Act of 1820 and the Missouri Compromise of 1821—Morse presented instead a tranquil and relatively uneventful scene. He toured the painting nationally in 1823, but its lack of sensational subject matter failed to attract wide audiences and ultimately proved to be a financial failure. In the ensuing years, Morse turned away from painting to pursue his scientific interests.

In the mid-19th century, pure landscape pictures were traditionally ranked lower than other subject matter, such as themes from history, mythology, literature, or religion. Thomas Cole sought to create what he called a “higher style of landscape” that blended narrative elements into carefully executed scenes from nature. His use of two canvases allowed him to build his narrative to even greater technical and emotional heights. The Departure introduces a troop of knights embarking on a heroic crusade in the early summer led by their lord on his valiant white horse. In The Return, a smaller group—weary and defeated—trudges home in the autumn dusk; they carry the dying lord, his riderless horse trailing behind.

The two landscapes were commissioned as a pair by wealthy landowner William Paterson Van Rensselaer in December 1836, specifying only that the paintings should depict morning and evening. Cole had recently enjoyed critical and popular success for his epic five-canvas series, The Course of Empire (1836, The New-York Historical Society) completed earlier in the year, which likely made Van Rensselaer choose him for the project. That Cole achieved his goal of a “higher style of landscape” among his contemporaries is reflected in the praise the paintings received in an 1837 New-York Mirror review:

These pictures represent Morning and Evening, or Sunrise and Sunset; and are, merely from that point of view, invaluable. They contrast the glowing warmth of one, with the cool tints and broad shadows of the other; and to do this is the work of a master, who has studied nature and loves her….Not only this is done, but a story is told by the poet-painter, elucidating at once, the times of chivalry and feudal barbarism, and the feelings with which man rushes forth in the morning of day and of life, and the slow and funereal movements which attend the setting of his sun.

In the mid-19th century, pure landscape pictures were traditionally ranked lower than other subject matter, such as themes from history, mythology, literature, or religion. Thomas Cole sought to create what he called a “higher style of landscape” that blended narrative elements into carefully executed scenes from nature. His use of two canvases allowed him to build his narrative to even greater technical and emotional heights. The Departure introduces a troop of knights embarking on a heroic crusade in the early summer led by their lord on his valiant white horse. In The Return, a smaller group—weary and defeated—trudges home in the autumn dusk; they carry the dying lord, his riderless horse trailing behind.

The two landscapes were commissioned as a pair by wealthy landowner William Paterson Van Rensselaer in December 1836, specifying only that the paintings should depict morning and evening. Cole had recently enjoyed critical and popular success for his epic five-canvas series, The Course of Empire (1836, The New-York Historical Society) completed earlier in the year, which likely made Van Rensselaer choose him for the project. That Cole achieved his goal of a “higher style of landscape” among his contemporaries is reflected in the praise the paintings received in an 1837 New-York Mirror review:

These pictures represent Morning and Evening, or Sunrise and Sunset; and are, merely from that point of view, invaluable. They contrast the glowing warmth of one, with the cool tints and broad shadows of the other; and to do this is the work of a master, who has studied nature and loves her….Not only this is done, but a story is told by the poet-painter, elucidating at once, the times of chivalry and feudal barbarism, and the feelings with which man rushes forth in the morning of day and of life, and the slow and funereal movements which attend the setting of his sun.

A Pastoral Visit, the most celebrated of Richard Norris Brooke’s genre scenes, or views of everyday life, depicts a family welcoming their elderly pastor to Sunday dinner—a frequent occurrence in both black and white rural parishes that could not afford parsonages. According to tradition, the pastor is served first and, following the meal, he will be presented with both the cigar box containing the congregation’s weekly contribution (duly protected by the family patriarch) and the cloth-wrapped fruit at right. The banjo, prominently placed at the center of the composition symbolizing its importance in African American culture, may indicate an after-dinner musical interlude.

The family’s home, rustic but comfortable, features a sturdy cupboard housing pottery and glass and brick fireplace on whose mantel are neatly arranged a coffee grinder, a ginger jar, and clothes irons. Decorating the corner near a damaged window are a circus poster and a string of dried chilies. Brooke had ample opportunity to study the interior depicted; it was located in a residence near his home in Warrenton, Virginia, where he painted the canvas. Likewise, the features of the figures resulted from the artist’s use of his Warrenton neighbors as models: George Washington, Georgianna Weeks, and Daniel Brown.

Brooke was one of many artists to depict African American life in the 1870s and 1880s, inspired by the dramatic social change during Reconstruction, when blacks achieved citizenship, voting rights, and protection under the Constitution. Unlike many of his peers, he portrayed his subjects with a degree of humanity and dignity rare in contemporary depictions of African Americans. In his letter offering the painting to the Corcoran Gallery of Art for purchase, Brooke criticized such renderings as “works of flimsy treatment and vulgar exaggeration.” He also referenced his recent French academic training, stating that he wished to elevate his rural subject “to that plane of sober and truthful treatment which ... has dignified the Peasant subjects of [his French contemporary] Jules Breton, and should characterize every work of art.”

In 1881, Brooke relocated from Warrenton to a well-known Washington studio building, Vernon Row, just east of the White House. There, he exhibited the painting and arranged for its loan and subsequent sale to the Corcoran. Active in almost every local arts organization of the day, the successful artist served as vice principal at the Corcoran School of Art from 1902 to 1918 and exhibited extensively at that institution. For reasons not entirely understood, soon after completing A Pastoral Visit he devoted himself almost entirely to landscape painting.

This painting, completed just three years before the Civil War began, may be an expression of northern antipathy toward the landed gentry of the south. Leisure and Labor is the culmination of Mayer's decade-long exploration of the blacksmith theme. The bifurcated canvas juxtaposes a well-dressed man leaning casually on the right—hands tucked in his pockets and legs crossed—with an industrious and productive blacksmith hard at work on the left. A broken plow and graceful greyhound further underscore his leisure. The dog evokes breeding of animals for sport and show, an idle pursuit of Southern aristocracy during this period. During the war, the greyhound was one of the symbols of the Confederacy in anti-Southern political satires. The moral lesson is further communicated by the white poster on the right which depicts a man (who resembles the Grim Reaper) running with scythe in hand above the misspelled text "Stop Theif!" reminding the viewer that time is precious and not to be wasted.

Mayer, a Maryland artist renowned for his historical subjects and genre scenes, remained publicly ambivalent about the Civil War. After its outbreak, he traveled to Paris, as did two of the most important American collectors of the 19th century: William T. Walters, who commissioned Leisure and Labor and who later founded the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and William Wilson Corcoran, who purchased the painting in 1859 and who later founded the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Both collectors were known Southern sympathizers.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, William Sidney Mount was America's most celebrated painter of genre scenes, which are views of everyday life. His work was admired for its ability to amuse audiences with complex verbal puns and stereotypical American characters. Messages in his works were often veiled, requiring viewers to puzzle out the meanings on their own. Mount offered a rare explanation for The Tough Story in a letter to his patron Robert Gilmor Jr., detailing the setting as a Long Island tavern and the three men as the tavern keeper (right), a traveler (standing), and an "old invalid . . . entertaining his young landlord with the longest story he is ever supposed to tell, having fairly tired out every other frequenter of the establishment."

As a painting about conversation, this is a work that marries content with form. The barfly's exhausting tale is echoed in the room's empty space, its dullness matched by the monotonous colors of the wall and floorboards. Although the men are united in a classic triangular composition, the stovepipe at the center divides their space. On the left, damage and decay surround the storyteller, apparent in the bandages around his neck and knee, the worn hat, and his broken chair. By contrast, the other two men share more comfortable surroundings, including warmth from the glowing stove and the well-stocked tavern shelves. This separation invites the viewer to laugh along with the pair on the right, perhaps at the storyteller's expense.
 
This painting was well received by its patron and critics alike. Proud of his successful marriage of form and content, Mount referred to this work as his "most finished painting yet."

Although Baltimore native Richard Caton Woodville lived abroad the majority of his short career, his most famous paintings depict life in his hometown. Like his contemporary William Sidney Mount, he portrayed colorful characters in stories marked by humor and deception, but Woodville's canvases assume a darker tone in both composition and subject matter.

In Waiting for the Stage, three men assemble in a tavern, commonly used as a waiting room for stagecoaches. Two of the men are seated at the table, engaged in what appears to be a game of cards; the gentleman with a carpetbag at his side is presumably a traveler. The third figure stands beside the table clutching a newspaper called The Spy. He wears the glasses of a blind man, but his cleverly titled journal betrays his ruse. From his elevated position, he can see both men's cards, and is likely conspiring with the traveler, who may be a conman. Light bounces off the wedding ring of the third individual, reminding the viewer of the existence of family members whose well-being could be threatened by this deceit. The small, cramped space of the tavern underscores the painting's menacing tone.

Woodville painted this scene in Paris, after leaving medical school and moving to Europe in 1845 to pursue painting full-time. He trained in Düsseldorf, Germany, before spending the next four years working in Paris and London. He died in London in 1855 having completed fewer than 15 oil paintings.

Charles Bird King painted this unusual and intriguing trompe-l'oeil, meaning "fool-the-eye," still life to resemble an alcove holding fictional artist C. Palette's meager possessions: a crust of bread, glass of water, palette, and journal of unpaid bills. Two calling cards addressed to Palette bespeak his sad circumstances. One, from a parsimonious would-be patron, Mrs. Skinflint, invites him to visit her after tea, and the other records the artist's debt of five dollars. Several details suggest a more complex message, and that Palette's tastes and ambitions outstrip his modest means. The advertisement for a Philadelphia sheriff's sale of an artist's property at the upper left lists a few articles of clothing and a peck of potatoes—in stark contrast to the fashionable beaver pelt hat nearby—but also features a 16-by-20-foot painting called Pursuit of Happiness.

King makes pointed reference to the lack of support for the arts in Philadelphia, where he lived with little professional success from 1812 to 1816, and more broadly to the lack of support for the arts in America. In addition to the locale of the sheriff's sale, a sheet of paper on top of the hat shows a perspective view of the city debtors' jail. A tally of paintings sold in Philadelphia, which peeks out from the red portfolio at lower right, records a large number of portraits, the most popular but least creative genre of the period. A book titled Choice Criticism on the Exhibitions at Philadelphia, at the very bottom, is noticeably thin; that and Mrs. Skinflint's invitation imply the lack of art patronage in Philadelphia. Indeed, many of King's fellow artists departed the city due to a lack of commissions.

By 1869, when he created this idyllic view, Albert Bierstadt had made two extensive trips to the American West. He based this lush scene of buffalo peacefully making their way across a river or creek against a roiling sky on views he had sketched during one or both of those expeditions. In a letter he wrote on September 3, 1859 during his excursion with the survey team of US Army Colonel Frederick W. Lander, the artist describes one such scene. He recorded his awe at encountering the majestic buffalo in a passage that could easily describe Buffalo Trail: Impending Storm:

We find here plenty of buffalo. One morning we saw a noble looking animal crossing the river near us, and I alighted from my ambulance and took a position behind a bluff, in order to give him a reception. As he came splashing through the water, I felt half inclined to lay down my rifle and take up my sketchbook, but I was so wrapped in admiration and study I could do neither for a few moments.

Bierstadt's meticulous attention to detail and texture, as well as his tightly brushed technique—results of his early training in Düsseldorf, Germany—characterize this bucolic, romantic scene.

Niagara's tremendous success both in the United States and abroad secured Frederic Edwin Church's reputation as the most famous American painter of his time. The acquisition of Niagara by the young Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1876 secured the institution's reputation and inspired other major artists to seek representation in the collection.

In the 19th century, many American artists attempted to capture the power and beauty of Niagara Falls. Widely considered the nation's greatest natural wonder as well as a symbol of its youthful vigor and promise, the site was also deemed far superior to any natural phenomenon in Europe. Church's majestic 1857 canvas reveals the vista from the Canadian shore, based on oil and pencil sketches he had made during several visits to the site in 1856. He was the first to render the spectacle on such a grand scale, with such fine detail, naturalism, and immediacy. He heightened the illusion of reality by selecting a non-traditional format of canvas with a width twice as wide as its height to convey the panoramic expanse of the scene. Moreover, he pushed the plane of the falls nearest the viewer significantly downward to reveal more of the far side as well as the dramatic rush of water. Most notably, he eliminated any suggestion of a foreground, allowing the viewer to experience the scene as if precariously positioned on the brink of the falls. As one writer enthusiastically noted, "this is Niagara, with the roar left out!"

Critics and public alike marveled at the painting, which debuted in a one-painting exhibition at a New York City gallery shortly after its completion. The 25-cent admission allowed each visitor to view the monumental canvas, sometimes using binoculars or other optical aids to enhance the experience. The admission price also included a pamphlet reprinting critics' praises of the canvas and offered exhibition-goers the opportunity to purchase a chromolithograph of the painting. Within two weeks, Niagara had lured 100,000 visitors to glimpse what one newspaper critic described as "the finest oil picture ever painted on this side of the Atlantic." Following its phenomenal success in New York, the painting was exhibited in major cities along the eastern seaboard, made two tours of Britain, and was included in the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Frederic Edwin Church and his fellow 19th-century landscape painters—many of whom were known as Hudson River School painters in accordance with the oft-depicted locale—extolled not only the natural wonders of the northeastern United States, but also those of the American West, South America, Europe, and the Near East, providing armchair travelers with views of exotic scenery most had never seen.

In 1853, Church embarked on a trip to South America, inspired in large part by the writings of prominent German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). The artist was particularly interested in the scientist's epic volume Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. Von Humboldt encouraged artists to record—and therefore share with viewers—the locale's diverse tropical features, for he understood the icy mountaintops, arid deserts, and steamy rainforests as evidence of a divine harmony in nature. Church heeded Von Humboldt's call, retracing his route through the Andes and recording in meticulous pencil and oil sketches details of nature and life along the Magdalena River in Colombia. Upon returning to his New York studio, he created Tamaca Palms using these studies, including those of the tamaca species of palm and the boat in the foreground, known as a champan or bongo. His attention to minute detail in the canvas shows the indelible influence of his teacher, Thomas Cole (1801–1848); moreover, it led one critic to deem Church "the very painter Humboldt so longs for in his writings."

Like his friend and fellow artist Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford sought inspiration both in the northeastern United States and further afield. The Ruins of the Parthenon derives from sketches he made while visiting the Acropolis in 1869. In this depiction, the famous temple is surrounded by strewn architectural fragments and studied by a sketching artist (possibly a self-portrait) and his Greek guide. However, the hilltop setting ultimately serves to showcase another more subtle motif: a remarkable range of light and atmospheric effects that Gifford rendered with unrivaled and much-heralded finesse. The sky's nearly invisible transitions from pale pinks near the horizon to deep blues above evidence the artist's frequent remark to his brother that of all of his paintings, this one demanded the most "painstaking labor." Tellingly, Gifford referenced his precise portrayal of light and atmosphere by deeming the completed work "not a picture of a building, but a picture of a day."

The artist considered The Ruins of the Parthenon—his last important painting—the crowning achievement of his career, and hoped that it would be acquired by an American museum. When he visited the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and reached the gallery featuring Church's Niagara, he remarked: "there would be a good place for my ‘Parthenon.'" Although the painting remained unsold at Gifford's death, the Corcoran purchased it at his estate sale in 1881 for $5,100, at the time the highest price ever paid for one of the artist's paintings.

Thomas Eakins made his career portraying upper-middle class residents of his native Philadelphia. Such depictions are anything but static likenesses; instead they show individuals engaged in their chosen profession or avocation, whether at the city's rivers and parks, in its surgical amphitheaters, or in its public and private performance venues, as in Singing a Pathetic Song.

This evocative depiction of the home musicale—popular in Victorian America generally, and in Eakins' own household in particular—exemplifies the artist's unidealized renderings of his contemporaries as well as his love of music. An earnest young singer accompanied by a pianist and cellist in a richly decorated interior concentrates on holding a note of her tune. The pathetic song, the most popular type of melody in 1860s and 1870s America, told tales of woe, such as death or tragic circumstances befalling innocent women or children. Recited by the singer as autobiographical, such ballads commonly moved audiences to tears. 

A leading art critic of the day called the work "admirably painted, and . . . absolutely true to nature, a perfect record of the life amid which the artist lives." The painting remained in Eakins's collection until late 1885, when Edward Hornor Coates, a trustee of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (where Eakins taught), asked to exchange it for his Swimming (1885, Amon Carter Museum), a commissioned painting whose depiction of the artist and his male students posed nude in a landscape was both unexpected and controversial.

Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherford White made quite an impact on her expatriate acquaintances in Europe. Novelist Edith Wharton recalled her striking beauty: "It is hard to picture nowadays the shell-like transparence, the luminous red-and-white, of those young cheeks untouched by paint or powder, in which the blood came and went like the lights of an aurora." Although she appears rather serious in this formal portrait, Mrs. White—called "Daisy"—was known to be quite lively in her social pursuits. As the author Henry James wrote from London in 1888: "The happy American here, beyond all others, is Mrs. Henry White."

When Gilded Age aristocrats and socialites wanted someone who could capture both their gifts and their status, they called on John Singer Sargent. Paris was the artist's home from 1874, when he began study there with the well-known portraitist Carolus-Duran, until 1886, when he moved to London. He frequently exhibited portraits at the annual Paris Salon, which led to many new assignments. Such was the case with this likeness of the wealthy Daisy White. Upon seeing Sargent's Lady with the Rose (1882, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) at the Salon of 1882, White arranged her commission. The subject came from a prominent academic and social New York lineage and in 1879 had married diplomat Henry White, scion of a distinguished Maryland family. When White requested her portrait at age 29, her husband was the First Secretary of the American legation in Paris. The couple lived mostly in that city before Henry White was posted to Vienna in 1883 (and later to London).

Sargent began the portrait in late 1882, and worked on it alongside the painting of another American woman living in Paris, Virginie Amélie Gautreau (Madame X, 1884, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). However, White left Paris for obligations in the south of France after only a few sittings. Gathering up the enormous and unusually wide canvas, the artist followed her and kept "brushing away" on the portrait in Nice and back in his Paris studio. The virtuoso handling of the dress—featuring a dazzling array of white fabrics of varying texture, including satin, lace, and tulle—and of the highlights on the fan and opera glasses makes the subject glow against the elegant chaise and muted background.

This charming still life, created just two years after John La Farge took up painting, is primarily a study of color and light. La Farge beautifully renders the effects of sunlight on the white curtain by blending an innovative mix of colors—peach, creamy white, and a light, green-tinged gray—to capture the subtleties of shadow, contour, and light on the fabric. Brushwork, not color or line, distinguishes the curtain from the window ledge and background sky, anticipating modernist art styles such as post-impressionism.

Painted within the year of his marriage to Margaret Mason Perry, Flowers on a Window Ledge may also express the artist's romantic sentiments. Such an interpretation was not lost on critics of the time, one of whom wrote that La Farge's flowers were "burning with love, beauty, and sympathy . . . their language is of the heart, and they talk to us of human love." The setting proves meaningful as well, as the canvas was painted from the window of Hessian House, a Rhode Island inn where La Farge and his wife stayed during the early years of their marriage. Moreover, the white curtain fabric visually evokes a bridal gown; the bowl of pink and red flowers, a bouquet; and the interior setting, the domesticity of marriage.

After a serious illness and a period of financial stress in 1866, the artist stopped producing still-life paintings. When he resumed working, he turned to mural painting and decorative stained glass, considered more conventional artistic practices at the time.

En route pour la pêche depicts a scene in the quiet fishing village of Cancale, on the north coast of Brittany, France. Against the broad beach at low tide, the town's quay and lighthouse, and cloud-filled blue skies, a group of women and children set out to gather fish and shellfish from shallow pools for their evening dinner. The figures, arranged along the light-dappled shore like figures on a classical frieze, are followed by several more people descending the slipway. John Singer Sargent's impressive composition and deft brushwork endow the popular, but often overly sentimentalized, 19th-century subject of everyday peasant life with an unprecedented freshness.

While this painting gives an impression of spontaneity and facile execution, Sargent devoted an extraordinary amount of effort to preparing it for the 1878 Paris Salon, a highly regulated annual exhibition. The young artist understood the conservative nature of the Salon and therefore executed the canvas as formally and tightly as possible given his training. Even before the Salon closed, the painting had found a patron, marking the second sale of Sargent's career.

Born to American parents in Florence, Italy, Sargent studied in Paris in the 1870s at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and with the fashionable French painter Carolus-Duran. During these formative years before his rapid rise to fame as a portraitist, Sargent loved to sketch the sea and coastal life while traveling with his family. The artist began to develop En route pour la pêche, along with a related work in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at age 21. These were his first genre paintings (scenes of everyday life) and, along with their many preparatory works, constituted his first large body of work devoted to one locale.

Abbott Thayer described Mount Monadnock, the subject of this subdued, violet-blue landscape, as "this dear mountain." It provided continual artistic inspiration and personal solace for the artist throughout his life. In this depiction, he casts the majority of the scene in shadow, save for the stark white mountain peak, illuminated by the rising sun in the dawn sky. Thayer represents the mountaintop in thick, expressive strokes of paint, further differentiating the peak from the more smoothly rendered landscape in the foreground. Born in Boston and raised in rural New Hampshire, Thayer trained in Paris and New York, becoming a successful portrait painter and leading member of the Society of American Artists. Wishing to retain his connection to the countryside, in 1888 Thayer acquired property in the quiet town of Dublin, New Hampshire, an artists' colony with views of his beloved mountain. He would settle there permanently by 1901.

A generation earlier, Mount Monadnock figured prominently in the lives of the transcendentalist poets and philosophers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Both artist and naturalist, Thayer was deeply rooted in transcendental philosophies that imbued his landscapes with cultural, spiritual, and personal significance. He regarded his landscapes as a form of portraiture, true to nature.

Upon learning in 1911 that a group of private developers wanted to purchase an expanse of Mount Monadnock, Thayer successfully organized the local community around its conservation. When he died, his ashes were scattered on its summit.

There may be no painter more associated with New York City in the early years of the 20th century than George Bellows. Like his fellow urban realists, particularly those of the so-called Ashcan School, Bellows fully subscribed to his mentor Robert Henri's credo: to create work "full of vitality and the actual life of the time." Forty-two Kids depicts a band of lanky, nude, and semi-clad boys engaged in a variety of antics—swimming, diving, sunbathing, smoking, and urinating—on and near a dilapidated wharf jutting out over the East River.

A sharp observer of urban life, Bellows sketched his streetwise subjects with his characteristic vigor and economy of means, and he has carefully rendered their varied ethnic backgrounds. In turn-of-the-century slang, "kids" referred to roaming young hooligans who were frequently the offspring of working-class immigrants living in Lower East Side tenements.

When it was exhibited in New York in 1908, the painting was derided by many critics due to its adventurous subject and exuberant style; one writer called it a "tour de force of absurdity." However, Forty-two Kids was purchased less than a year after its completion, marking the second sale of Bellows's career and his first to a private collector.

Edward Hopper, known for haunting depictions of isolation in American life, was also a dedicated painter of nautical subjects, the result of a lifelong enthusiasm for the sea. In 1934, Hopper and his wife, Jo, built a simple home and studio in South Truro, Massachusetts, to escape summers in New York City. In the ensuing years, he executed a number of maritime works from this location, including Ground Swell.

Despite its bright palette and seemingly serene subject, Ground Swell echoes the themes of loneliness and escape typical of Hopper's oeuvre. The blue sky, sun-kissed figures, and vast rolling water strike a calm note in the picture; however, the visible disengagement of the figures from each other and their noticeable preoccupation with the bell buoy placed at the center of the canvas call into question this initial sense of serenity. The lone dark element in a sea of blues and whites, the buoy confronts the small catboat in the middle of an otherwise empty waterscape. Its role, to emit a warning sound in advance of unseen or imminent danger, renders its presence in the picture ominous. The cirrus clouds in the blue sky—often harbingers of approaching storms—reinforce this sense of disturbance in the otherwise peaceful setting.

Although Hopper resisted offering explanations of his paintings, the signs of impending danger here may also register a more severe disturbance: during the time that Hopper worked on Ground Swell, from August to 15 September 1939, World War II broke out in Europe.

This scene depicts a lively gathering of poets and artists at Petitpas', a French restaurant and boardinghouse in the Chelsea district of New York City. Shown from left to right around the table are literary critic Van Wyck Brooks; painter John Butler Yeats; poet Alan Seeger; the artist's wife, Dolly Sloan; Celestine Petipas (standing); fiction writer Robert Sneddon; miniature painter Eulabee Dix; John Sloan, the artist (corner); Fred King, the editor of Literary Digest; and, in the foreground, Vera Jelihovsky Johnston, wife of the Irish scholar Charles Johnston.
 
Associated with the Ashcan School—a group of urban Realists who espoused the notion of "art for life's sake" instead of "art for art's sake"—John Sloan was well known for his scenes of everyday life. This lively representation of assembled artists and friends comes out of that context, as gatherings such as the one in the painting were common at the time. John Butler Yeats, Irish painter and father of poet William Butler Yeats, lived at Petipas' from 1909 until his death in 1922, and presided nightly at a table in the courtyard. By 1910, when Sloan began this painting, Yeats had become a significant mentor to the artist, especially in his detailed and methodical approach to portraiture. It is notable that Sloan chose to depict Yeats drawing a portrait rather than engaging in the lively conversation for which he was so well known. Sloan's rendering of his own likeness is also noteworthy as one of the most carefully executed and complete within the painting. These choices by Sloan invite a reading of this work as a tribute to the elder Yeats and his significant influence on Sloan.

The painting also functions as a commemoration of the year 1910 in general, a time of several professional accomplishments for Sloan, some of which were celebrated at this famed restaurant.

In 1877 Albert Bierstadt displayed this enormous composite of Sierra Nevada mountain views at a New York City exhibition with the generic title Mountain Lake. The following year, inspired in part by the Corcoran Gallery of Art's well-publicized purchase of his rival Frederic Edwin Church's Niagara, Bierstadt offered the work—rechristened Mount Corcoran—to the museum and its founder, William Wilson Corcoran. Staff and board members were deeply suspicious, but Bierstadt presented them with a War Department map showing the mountain's location. Curator William MacLeod opined that a government official had manually added Corcoran's name to the document, but it was revealed that the artist had, in fact, named a specific Sierra Nevada peak for the banker (albeit after he had offered him the canvas). Undeterred by the controversy surrounding the painting's acquisition, the artist stated: "I am happy to have named one of our highest mountains after him, the first to catch the morning sunlight [and] the last to say good night."

Bierstadt was the first artist to use his European training to translate field studies into expansive paintings celebrating western American grandeur. Evident everywhere in Mount Corcoran, from the glassy water to the snowy mountain peaks, are the artist's detailed naturalism and smooth surfaces. Following the discovery of gold in California, the American West became a source of intense fascination for East Coast art patrons and armchair travelers alike who were eager to see images of the vistas enthusiastically described by forty-niners, surveyors, and journalists. In 1859 Bierstadt joined US Army Colonel Frederick W. Lander's survey party to the Rocky Mountains. Four years later he set his sights on California's spectacular Yosemite Valley. When he returned to New York following that trip, Bierstadt began producing stunning landscapes such as Mount Corcoran that introduced eastern audiences to the natural wonders of the West.

The Last of the Buffalo is Albert Bierstadt's final great western landscape. Measuring six by ten feet, it perfectly complements his first painting of that size, Lake Lucerne (1858), also in the National Gallery of Art collection. The ambitious landscape combines a variety of elements he had sketched during early western excursions (1859, 1863, and 1871), and is closely related to later studies he made in Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1881 (contained in two sketchbooks also in the National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection). Despite its composite nature, the view incorporates many topographical features representative of the Great Plains. The dead and injured buffalo in the foreground occupy a dry, golden meadow; their counterparts cross a wide river in the middle ground; and others graze as far as the eye can see as the landscape turns to prairies, hills, mesas, and snowcapped peaks. Likewise, the fertile landscape nurtures a profusion of plains wildlife, including elk, antelope, fox, rabbits, and even a prairie dog at lower left.

Many of these animals turn to look at the focal group of Native American, horse, and charging buffalo locked in combat. In contrast to his careful record of landscape and fauna, the artist's rendering of this confrontation and its backdrop of seemingly limitless herds is a romantic invention rather than an accurate depiction of life on the frontier. By the time Bierstadt painted this canvas, the buffalo was on the verge of extinction, as were the Plains Indians who relied on it for their survival. The animals had been reduced to only about 1,000 from 30 million at the beginning of the century, largely because of demand for their hides in the fashion industry. Scattering buffalo skulls and other bones around the deadly battle, Bierstadt created what one scholar described as "a masterfully conceived fiction that addressed contemporary issues"—one that references, even laments, the destruction wrought by encroaching settlement.