The Hudson River School is the first wide scale artistic movement to be produced in America. Developed in the early nineteenth century, the Hudson River School was spearheaded by Thomas Cole, who was British born, but who largely grew up and was trained in America. Cole's sweeping landscapes of the Hudson River Valley both proved inspirational to the movement's other artists and gave the school its name.

John Singer Sargent was the premier portrait painter in America in the late nineteenth century, largely thanks to his realistic and dramatic style of painting. This style, though, was also completely at odds with the Impressionism and then Post-Impressionism that became immensely popular in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Sargent was unappreciated for years, with his star only rising again in the late twentieth century, decades after his death.

George Catlin was born in Pennsylvania in 1796, and first went to St. Louis and the then Western portion of the United States in 1830. For the next few years, Catlin would make the first serious paintings, rather than quick etchings or sketches, of Native Americans in traditional dress. Catlin's paintings became the indelible images of many Native American tribes throughout the nineteenth century.

"The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog," painted in 1818, is considered one of the chief examples of Romantic visual arts, and it is the most famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich. The painting, showing a young man looking out over mountains submerged in a bank of fog, speaks to many important themes of Romanticism, like a return to nature, a focus on the individual, and an adventurous spirit.

Paul Gauguin was involved with the Impressionists in Paris during the 1880s, but visited Polynesia in the 1890s repeatedly, eventually moving there. While in Polynesia, Gauguin kept painting and kept up his ties to the French art world. Gauguin's paintings of Polynesian women, culture, and scenes were hugely influential on younger artists, like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, who moved towards "primitive art" in the early twentieth century.

"Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1" is one of the most famous paintings in the world, but few people know its name, instead referring to it by the popular title of "Whistler's Mother." While the 1871 painting is indeed a portrait of the artist's mother sitting, James McNeill Whistler was annoyed when his work was called a "portrait." Whistler preferred to think of the painting as exactly what he called, a study in shades of grey and black which showed his ability with dark colors.

Gustave Courbet was the figure in developing realism as a specific artistic genre, which sought clear depictions of everyday life in an uncompromising manner. Courbet's The Desperate Man makes the viewer confront the madness in the eyes of the painter himself, while The Meeting shows Courbet venturing to find his art dealer in the South of France. Both are executed with fastidious lines and clear colors that capture the image portrayed exactly.

These paintings are paragons of Impressonism done by two of its foremost practitioners. Figure 1 is one of Claude Monet's studies of Rouen Cathedral, from 1888, while Figure 2 is one of Paul Cezanne's still lifes from 1899. Impressionism sought to depict emotional realism and perceptual limitations in its works by creating less than perfect representations of images with obvious brushstrokes, and by focusing on more mundane, everyday subjects.

Édouard Manet's massive painting of a group of people having a luncheon picnic, which included a nude woman in the foreground, caused a massive scandal when it was presented to the 1863 Salon. The thematic content of the painting, which was both an everyday scene and featured a luxuriating nude, was only part of the issue. Manet's style differed greatly from the academic mastery of the previous generation of French painters, such as David, Cabanel, and Ingres, and greatly presaged Impressionism.

The Impressionists are most famous for their particular painting style, which used obvious brushwork to make a less-than-realistic depiction of a scene in order to portray movement and emotion. At the time of their emergence, the Impressionists were shocking to the academic French art world in their persistent use of everyday scenes and common items. Impressionists often showed people at cafés or in parks, and even their landscapes were usually quite small compared to previous images.