American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 H. Barbara Weinberg, Carrie Rebora Barratt, Margaret C. Conrads, E. Bruce Robertson – Hardcover: 240 pages; Metropolitan Museum of Art (Oct 27, 2009)

This beautiful volume explores American paintings of people engaged in the tasks and pleasures of everyday life between the colonial era and World War I. These works reflect key historical and cultural developments, including the growth of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration; changing gender roles; and the shifting location and meaning of the frontier.

Focusing on leading artists, from John Singleton Copley to John Sloan, the authors address narrative content in colonial and early national portraits; genre scenes of the Jacksonian period; images from the Civil War era; and works by American Impressionists and realists in the decades before and after 1900. Like the exhibition it accompanies, the book reflects transformations in artists’ aspirations and viewers’ expectations as America evolved from isolated British outpost to leading independent participant in international affairs.

Visions of the Susquehanna: 250 Years of Paintings by American Masters by Rob Evans – Perfect Paperback: 80 pages; Lancaster Museum of Art; 1st edition (Sep 7, 2006)

The Susquehanna River is one of the great rivers of the United States and one of the earliest to be explored. This handsome book, fully illustrated in color, presents intimate and varied views of its waters and landscape, by the many prominent American artists who have gravitated there to paint it over the last two and a half centuries including Benjamin West, Thomas Moran, George Inness, Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Charles Demuth and such contemporary masters as Mark Innerst, Debra Bermingham, Leonard Koscianski, Randall Exon, Stephen Hannock, and many others. Includes essays by art historians David Dearinger and Leo Mazow.

Before 1948: American Paintings in Georgia Collections by Donald D. Keyes, Heidi Domescik, Jennifer Deprima, Terry Kay (Introduction) – Hardcover: 123 pages; Georgia Museum of Art (Jan 1999)

This publication commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Georgia Museum of Art by illustrating and outlining the paintings included in the anniversary exhibition. American works done before 1948 were selected by Donald D. Keyes, curator of paintings, and highlight artists such as John Sloan, Leon Kroll, Gilbert Stuart, and Lilla Cabot Perry. Novelist Terry Kay contributed the introduction.

Celebrating Florida: Works of Art from the Vickers Collection by Gary R. Libby – Paperback: 144 pages; University Press of Florida; 2nd edition (Sep 1, 1996)

Celebrating Florida presents for the first time a full-color collection of 66 important paintings, drawings, and prints of Florida-based art. Featuring such artists as Winslow Homer, Louis Comfort Tiffany, George Inness, William Glackens, Martin Johnson Heade, Frank Shapleigh, and Herman Herzog, the book highlights some of the world's most significant artists, who came to Florida from 1823 to 1950 to capture the Sunshine State.

Essays by noted historians Wendell Garrett and Erik Robinson discuss the settlement of Florida and its birth as a state in 1845. Additional essays present an aesthetic, historical, social, and cultural overview of the significance of the art as well as biographical information about each artist.

Celebrating Florida is a Sesquicentennial publication, part of the celebration of 150 years of Florida statehood.

Art in Florida: 1564-1945 by Maybelle Mann – Hardcover: 208 pages; Pineapple Press; 1st edition (Nov 1, 1999)

The early chapters document the artistic offerings of early explorers and naturalists like Mark Catesby and John James Audubon, as well as the Seminole Indians and those who painted them, including George Catlin and Charles Bird King. St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement, also came to be the first center of art in Florida. After the Civil War, when Northerners began to flock to Florida for health and pleasure, art found a place in the thriving business of travel literature. This drew artist like brothers Edward and Thomas Moran, who began to paint the beauty of Florida. In the 1880s, St. Augustine, through the efforts of Henry Morrison Flagler, again became the center of artistic endeavor, attracting artists like Martin Johnson Heade.

At the end of the century many prominent American artists arrived and painted the Florida they found. This included Frederic Remington, George Inness, Hermann Herzog, and Winslow Homer. In the first half of the twentieth century, Florida paintings were created by such notables as John Singer Sargent, Jane Patterson, Martha Walter, Milton Avery, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Harold Betts, Frank Weston Benson, Ralston Crawford, and Andrew Wyeth. The final chapter covers government-sponsored art in the 1930's, including murals in public buildings and the Index of American Design.

Collected here are 160 illustrations of Florida art, 100 in color. The illustrated paintings were gathered from public and private collections all over the country, many reproduced here for the first time.

Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950 by Dean A. Porter, Teresa Hayes Ebie, Suzan Campbell – Hardcover: 400 pages; Snite Museum of Art; 1st edition (May 1, 1999)

Reader review: Taos Artists and Their Patrons is probably the finest study to appear devoted to a single school of painting, that which arose in Taos in New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century. The authors have thoroughly investigated all aspects of patronage—exhibitions, individual advocates, institutional support, and many other forms. At the same time, they have presented what must be the finest study of the work of the artists active in Taos, embellished by a wealth of marvellous images, beautifully reporduced. The book enjoys three major accomplishments: it is a definitive study of the nature of American art patronage; it is a thorough review of one of the most important regional schools of art in this country; and it's a fabulous read!

Art In A Season Of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, And Patrons In Early America (Early American Studies) by Margaretta M. Lovell – Hardcover: 341 pages; University of Pennsylvania Press (Apr 30, 2005)

Focusing on the rich heritage of art-making in the eighteenth century, this lushly illustrated book positions both well-known painters and unknown artisans within the framework of their economic lives, their families, and the geographies through which they moved as they created notable careers and memorable objects. In considering both painting and decorative arts simultaneously, Art in a Season of Revolution departs from standard practice and resituates painters as artisans. Moreover, it gives equal play to the lives of the makers and the lives of the objects, to studying both within the interdependent social and economic webs linking local and distant populations of workers, theorists, suppliers, and patrons throughout the mercantile Atlantic.

American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century (A Publication of the National Gallery of Art, Washington) by Ellen G. Miles, Patricia Burda, Cynthia J. Mills, Leslie Kaye Reinhardt – Hardcover: 440 pages; Oxford University Press, USA (Jan 11, 1996) Best Seller

The National Gallery's collection of eighteenth-century American paintings includes some of its greatest treasures and most beloved national icons. John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark, Gilbert Stuart's The Skater (Portrait of William Granti) and George Washington (Vaughan portrait)--as well as his portraits of the first five presidents of the United States, the so-called Gibbs-Coolidge portraits--and Edward Savage's Washington Family. Ellen G. Miles, curator of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, presents new research culled from letters, wills, and other previously unpublished documents that offer a fresh perspective on the artists and sitters, as well as new insight into the paintings. (This publication is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation).

Early Art and Artists in West Virginia by John A. Cuthbert – Hardcover: 301 pages; West Virginia University (Nov, 2000)

The history of fine painting in West Virginia has long been overshadowed by the state's recognized excellence in the areas of folk arts. This beautiful, museum-quality book corrects that oversight, documenting the life and work of approximately 1,000 painters who worked in the state before about 1930. From the early small-town portraitists, to the scores of prominent landscapists who depicted the state's legendary beauty, to the West Virginia masters of the modernist movements, native and visiting artists have practiced every style of American art. This lavishly produced, oversized book features hundreds of full-color reproductions from museums and private collections around the world.

American Realism by Edward Lucie-Smith – Hardcover: 240 pages; Harry N. Abrams Inc; 1st edition (Sep 1, 1994)

American Realism is Edward Lucie-Smith's eloquent and interesting discourse tracing the progress of American realist art from the colonial period through postmodernism. It features a generous 250 illustrations and 115 gorgeous, full-color plates. Lucie-Smith's underlying argument seems to be that realism more accurately reveals the American character than does abstract expressionism or minimalism. This premise is developed by examining specific paintings and placing them in a cultural and historical context. Of particular interest are the sections on Thomas Eakins, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, Philip Pearlstein, Andy Warhol, and Eric Fischl. —Madeline Crowley

Downriver: Currents of Style in Louisiana Painting, 1800-1950 (Hardcover) by Estill Curtis Pennington – Hardcover: 208 pages; Pelican Publishing Company (Feb 1991)