SEPTEMBER
Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap

George Caleb Bingham’s life was filled with highlights and tragedies alike, but he emerged to be considered one of American’s greatest painters. Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap captures the period when Bingham focused on the western frontier.

OCTOBER
Niagara Falls, From the American Side

Frederic Edwin Church was trained by the “father of landscape,” Thomas Cole, who taught Church that creating art was both a spiritual and a moral endeavor. Niagara Falls, From the American Side was painted in the Romantic and Hudson River School method of painting which included grand scale often with distant, insignificant figures.

NOVEMBER
Canyon de Chelly

Young Edward Sheriff Curtis taught himself to make an early version of a camera that later, transitioned into a business opportunity, including an opportunity to photo-document the vanishing Native American population. Canyon de Chelly is part of the North American Indian series photographed in 1904.

DECEMBER
Washington Crossing the Delaware

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze was a child-emigrant to America from Germany. Leutze moved back to Germany as an adult and earned a reputation as the most preeminent American artist living abroad. Washington Crossing the Delaware is well known for its image. It’s also well known for its discrepancies.

JANUARY
Liberty Bowl, No. 45

Paul Revere did have that famous 1775 midnight ride in Boston announcing the approaching British troops to Samuel Adams and John Hancock. He was also an exceptionally talented silversmith. Liberty Bowl, No. 45 was made to pay tribute to politicians who positioned the American colonists one step closer to the Revolutionary War.

FEBRUARY
Blue Hole, Little Miami River

Robert Scott Duncanson was trained as a house painter but had aspiration to be an artist recognized for his talent alongside white and European artists. Blue Hole, Little Miami River, painted in the Hudson River School and Romantic style, features a panoramic view of the wilderness near Cincinnati in 1851.

MARCH
Anna Cuyler

Henrietta Dering Johnston’s life was filled with twists and turns as she navigated marriages, children, hurricanes, and life in the New World in 1708. Johnston was the first woman in America to earn money as an artist. Anna Cuyler is a waist-up pastel portrait in a three-quarter pose of the wife of a prominent business man.

APRIL
Grand Canyon of The Yellowstone

Thomas Moran loved to draw and often went on sketching trips into the nearby forests and then convert them to large-scale paintings back in the studio. His interest in westward expansion took him on many expeditions west. Grand Canyon of The Yellowstone hangs in the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

MAY
Thunderstorm On Narragansett Bay

Martin Johnson Heade worked as a portrait painter turned plein-air landscape/seascape painter. He used the theme of the threatening sky as a metaphor for the recent Civil War and Reconstruction Era. Thunderstorm on the Narragansett Bay was the last painting Heade completed under his thunderstorm theme.

JUNE
Declaration of Independence

John Trumbull was admitted to Harvard as a junior and graduated at age seventeen and was the first artist in America to receive a university degree. Declaration of Independence does not depict the actual signing but the presentation of the draft by the Committee of Five (Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Livingston and Sherman).