American painting starts as a colonial import and ends up somewhere nobody in Europe expected. The paintings below run from a Revolutionary-era shark attack in 1778 to a Bahamian storm in 1899, and together they trace how American art found its own eye.
Two of the most famous American images, American Gothic by Grant Wood and Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, are still under US copyright and can't be reproduced here. I mention them below without images. Everything pictured in this list is old enough to be in the public domain, verified painting by painting.
In 30 seconds:
Colonial American painting starts with portraitists trained in the British tradition, Copley chief among them.
The Hudson River School, roughly the 1820s to the 1870s, gave landscape its own American subject: the wilderness itself.
Sargent, Whistler, Cassatt and Homer all trained or worked in Europe, but painted with an American eye.
American Gothic and Nighthawks stay off this list because Wood (died 1942) and Hopper (died 1967) are still under copyright in the US.
The paintings below span 1778 to 1899, from a Boston-born painter working in London to a Maine painter watching the Gulf Stream.
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1. Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley (1778)
Copley painted this almost thirty years after the event, from an account given to him by the man in the water himself. Brook Watson lost his lower right leg to a shark in Havana harbor in 1749, when he was fourteen. He survived, went on to become a wealthy merchant and Lord Mayor of London, and commissioned this painting as a record of the day that shaped his life.
Copley never went to Havana. The tower in the background is invented, and the shark's anatomy is closer to imagination than biology. What is not invented is the structure: nine men pulling in different directions around one boy in the water, none of them looking at the same thing at the same time.
2. Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze (1851)
Leutze painted this in Düsseldorf, Germany, using German models and a boat that never existed in that shape. He was working from a subject he had never seen, for a country he had left as a child, forty years after the crossing itself happened on Christmas night in 1776.
The flag in the boat is the Stars and Stripes, adopted by Congress in June 1777, six months after the crossing it appears in. Leutze's first version of the painting was damaged by fire in Germany and later destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942. The version at the Met is the second one he made, in 1851.
3. The Oxbow, Thomas Cole (1836)
The full title is View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. Cole split the canvas in two: a storm-battered wilderness on the left, cleared farmland lit by sun on the right, the Connecticut River bending between them in the shape that gives the painting its short name.
Look at the lower center of the canvas and you can find Cole himself, painted small, seated at his easel with his back turned, looking up at the viewer. Cole founded what later got called the Hudson River School, the first painting movement built around American, not European, land.
4. Kindred Spirits, Asher Brown Durand (1849)
Thomas Cole died suddenly in February 1848. Poet William Cullen Bryant gave the eulogy. New York merchant Jonathan Sturges then commissioned Durand to paint the two men together, standing on a rock ledge above the Catskills, as a thank you gift to Bryant.
Durand carved both their names into the bark of the birch tree at the center of the composition. The painting stayed with the New York Public Library until 2005, when it sold at auction for 35 million dollars, a record at the time for a painting by an American artist. It now hangs in Arkansas.
Durand's circle overlaps with Sargent's a generation later. I go deeper into how American portraiture found its footing in my piece on John Singer Sargent.
5. Heart of the Andes, Frederic Edwin Church (1859)
Church traveled through Ecuador and Colombia inspired by the writings of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, then combined what he saw into one composite landscape that exists nowhere on a map. No single valley looks like this. Every detail in it does.
When Church first showed the painting in New York in 1859, he displayed it alone in a darkened room, lit by gas lamps and framed like a window with curtains on either side. Visitors paid 25 cents and queued for hours. It sold for 10,000 dollars, an enormous price for an American painting at the time.
6. Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, George Caleb Bingham (1845)
Bingham first called it French Trader and Half-Breed Son. It shows a father and son drifting down the Missouri River in a dugout canoe, an animal chained at the bow, its reflection stretched flat on water so still it barely moves.
Historians have argued for decades over what the animal actually is. Some read it as a bear cub, others as a fox. When the painting was shown at the American Art-Union in New York in 1845, critics singled out its silence and stillness, unusual qualities for a frontier subject at the time.
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7. Whistler's Mother, James McNeill Whistler (1871)
Whistler's official title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. His mother Anna sat for it in London at 67 years old, reportedly because the model Whistler had originally booked failed to turn up. He insisted the painting be read as a study in composition and tone, not as a sentimental portrait.
The Royal Academy's hanging committee rejected it at first. It was accepted only after a senior academician stepped in on Whistler's behalf. In 1891, the French state bought it, making it the first painting by an American artist to enter a national European collection.
8. The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins (1875)
Eakins painted surgeon Samuel Gross mid-operation at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, lecturing to students while blood shows on his hand and scalpel. He submitted it to the art jury of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. The jury turned it down as too graphic for the fine art galleries, and it was shown instead in a medical exhibit.
Jefferson Medical College bought the painting for 200 dollars in 1878. In 2006, after Thomas Jefferson University tried to sell it to an out of state museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts jointly paid 68 million dollars to keep it in the city where it was painted.
9. The Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer (1899)
A lone sailor drifts on a dismasted boat, sharks circling, a waterspout closing in, a ship on the horizon too far to help. Homer painted it after winters spent in the Bahamas, and he gave the man no name and no rescue.
When the painting was exhibited, viewers kept asking Homer what happened to the sailor next. He wrote back, irritated, that the man was fine and would be picked up, annoyed that people needed the story finished for them instead of reading the picture as it stood.
Homer spent the last decades of his life painting the sea obsessively. I cover his full career, and the isolation he chose for it, in my piece on Winslow Homer.
10. Madame X, John Singer Sargent (1884)
The sitter was Virginie Gautreau, a Louisiana-born socialite married to a French banker. Sargent painted her in Paris, in profile, her skin powdered pale, one strap of her black dress slipping off her shoulder in the version he first submitted to the 1884 Salon.
The painting caused a scandal loud enough to damage both the sitter's reputation and Sargent's career in Paris. He repainted the strap higher on her shoulder and kept the canvas for over thirty years, calling it his best work. He sold it to the Met in 1916 on the condition her name never be attached to it publicly.
11. The Boating Party, Mary Cassatt (1893-1894)
Cassatt painted this on the French Riviera, a few years after seeing an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in Paris that reshaped how she framed a scene. The man's back and the boat's hull take up most of the foreground, an odd, cropped choice for the period.
The mother and child face him from the far end of the boat, small against the flat blocks of color. Cassatt was American but spent almost her entire career in France, close to Degas and the Impressionist circle that never fully accepted a woman as an equal member.
Cassatt is one of only a handful of American women to break into the Impressionist circle in Paris. I tell her full story in my piece on Mary Cassatt.
12. Among the Sierra Nevada, California, Albert Bierstadt (1868)
Bierstadt was born in Germany and joined survey expeditions heading west, sketching mountains he later assembled into paintings back in his New York studio. This scene is not one specific place. It is several Sierra Nevada views combined into a single composite, the light pushed brighter and the peaks pushed higher than any of them alone.
Shown in London in 1868, it drew large crowds before it ever crossed back to an American collection. Later critics accused Bierstadt of exaggerating scale and light for effect, a charge now generally folded into how his work gets read rather than treated as a flaw to hide.
Where to see them
Watson and the Shark: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Washington Crossing the Delaware: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The Oxbow: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Kindred Spirits: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville.
Heart of the Andes: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Whistler's Mother: Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
The Gross Clinic: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Gulf Stream: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Madame X: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The Boating Party: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
Among the Sierra Nevada, California: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC.
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Famous American paintings, the questions that come up
What is the most famous American painting? Ask a general audience and two names dominate: American Gothic by Grant Wood and Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. Both are still under US copyright, which is why neither appears in image form on this list, though both are discussed above.
Who is considered the first great American painter? John Singleton Copley, working in colonial Boston before he relocated to London in 1774, ahead of the Revolutionary War.
What was the Hudson River School? A loose group of 19th-century landscape painters, including Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, who made the American wilderness their central subject.
Is Whistler's Mother owned by an American museum? No. It has belonged to the French state since 1891 and hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, not in the United States.
What is the most expensive American painting ever sold at auction? Records shift year to year, but Asher Durand's Kindred Spirits set one benchmark in 2005, selling for 35 million dollars, a record at the time for a painting by an American artist.
Why American Gothic never left Chicago
Grant Wood entered American Gothic into a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930. It won a 300 dollar prize, the museum bought it on the spot for its permanent collection, and it has stayed in Chicago ever since.
For more on how American art built its own visual language, read my piece on Winslow Homer or start with what Cool Stories About Art is.