Frederic Church’s painting "The Heart of the Andes" as displayed in the fine art gallery at the Metropolitan Fair in New York

Nineteenth-century landscape paintings in the Americas were prompted by a desire to depict the hemisphere’s most remote regions, and were largely informed by scientific inquiry...

The decade of the 1850s was, for many, a period of a satisfying coming of age. The Industrial Revolution, which had developed in the United States a bit later than in England, had matured, and the nation was on its way to being a global economic presence (despite a financial depression in 1857). The Gadsden Purchase in 1853 transferred Mexican land (this time without going to war) to the US...

~Had the tour of Edward Troye’s Holy Land paintings been unsuccessful, it would probably not have affected his career adversely, for at the time he could have fallen back on his booming business in portraits of Thoroughbred horses. The artist James Fairman had no such safety net. A figure who resists categorization and easy placement into the standard...

Crowds flocked to see The Heart of the Andes (see fig. 22). Over a mere three-week...

Art history has been increasingly interested in examining artworks within changing historical, social, institutional, economic, aesthetic, and intellectual contexts—all of which can be metaphorically termed frames. But what are the physical and optical limits of the painting? And can broadening those limits expand our historical understanding? In considering paintings as objects, where shall we set the boundaries? How can marks or labels affixed to a painting contribute to our historical …