Category Archives: American Paintings

Early on in the Unsung Heroes series I featured American illustrator Maxfield Parrish. But in truth he’s not all that unsung, and in the USA in particular he is considered one of the all time greats, with good reason.

This may be the scariest political painting of all time! From left to right: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Jerry Nadler

The Scariest Halloween painting of all time.
Have you seen?
Did it make you laugh
or make you scream?

A haunted building for the Acussator
Was once a place of great rapport.
Fenced from within and now from without,
We have no idea what they’re talking about.

The mummy of this ghoulish troupe
Fills his bucket with treats and goop.
Follow his lead and ask for treats,
But his tricks are filled with painful deceits.

She holds the keys that were once procured,
The potions and spells that have occurred.
And in the future she may announce
A coveted chair in the People’s House.

[…]

Click here for complete poem.

The Beeches. Date: 1845
Artist: Asher Brown Durand (American, Jefferson, New Jersey 1796–1886 Maplewood, New Jersey)

“The Return” by Thomas Cole. In 1836 William Paterson Van Rensselaer commissioned Thomas Cole to produce a pair canvases representing morning and evening. The Departure, set in summer, depicts a lord leading a detachment of knights on some valiant crusade. The Return, an autumn landscape, shows him being carried to church on a stretcher, trailed by a lone escort and his riderless horse.

Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.

Durand’s landscapes were so popular that they were often acquired by enthusiastic collectors almost as soon as the artist finished painting them. Morris K. Jesup, who commissioned this painting, also owned “The Beeches” (15.30.59) and several other important pictures by artists of the Hudson River School. In this view of luminous water and misty distance, he demonstrated how carefully he analyzed the subtle changes taking place in nature and showed how well he knew the technical secrets of depicting them.

The Architect’s Dream is an 1840 oil painting created by Thomas Cole for New York architect Ithiel Town. Cole incorporated pieces of architecture from Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Gothic styles in various different parts of the painting, having dabbled in architecture previously.^[1] Cole finished the painting in only five weeks and showed it in the National Academy of Design annual exhibition that year.

Thomas Hill (September 11, 1829 – June 30, 1908) was an English-born American artist of the 19th century. He produced many fine paintings of the California landscape, in particular of the Yosemite Valley, as well as the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Cotopaxi, the quintessential nineteenth-century vision of nature’s sublime and terrifying power, was painted on commission for the well-known book collector and philanthropist James Lenox when Church was at the height of his fame. The painting made a tremendous impact on the American art public, who perceived it as a geological parable of the Civil War then in progress. The viewer’s attention is focused on two principal motifs—the burning disc of the rising sun in its contest with the smoldering volcano. The colors radiate with fiery intensity against a low, pearlescent skyline. In this cosmic drama of light dispelling darkness, Church mirrors the contemporary tragedy of the Civil War and offers hope for its resolution through the cross formed by the sun’s reflection on the lake. No other representation so summarized American ideals at this critical point in the nation’s history.

Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823–1900), Sunset, Lake George, New York, 1867