Ryder’s 1882 visit to Tangier, Morocco, may have inspired this image of a solitary scout, dressed in a white cloak and holding a rifle at the ready. Typical of the artist’s visionary style, the horseman appears like a mirage coming out of a heat-seared desert landscape. This Orientalist subject may have been inspired by the earlier French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, whose similar paintings were exhibited by Ryder’s New York art dealer.

Vedder’s interest in ancient Egypt was inspired in part by recent archaeological discoveries, including the 1858 excavation of the Great Sphinx at Giza. In Greek mythology, the sphinx—half woman and half lion—demanded that travelers answer her riddle, strangling those who failed. Surrounded by architectural ruins, a shipwreck, and the skulls of her victims, Vedder’s sphinx reflects the fascination with women as dangerous and erotic temptresses.

Although some of Eakins’s portraits incorporate objects that help identify his sitters’ hobbies and occupations, portrait heads emphasize who they were as thinking and feeling human beings. Eakins probably perceived William Woolsey Johnson, a professor of mathematics at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, as a kindred spirit, as he once observed, “All the sciences are done in a simple way; in mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.”

Mount Vernon was a slave plantation and the home of George Washington, the first president of the United States. After Washington’s death the property deteriorated drastically—as evidenced here by the exposed and warped porch column. In 1858, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union purchased the mansion and surrounding land for $200,000 and founded the nation’s first historic house museum.

This painting depicts the children of Reverend William Anderson Scott, a Presbyterian minister in New Orleans from 1842 to 1854. The spire of his First Presbyterian Church is visible at the center of the city’s skyline. Scott family papers suggest that the African American woman at the right is Mila, who was enslaved by the family. Her inferior position relative to the children is emphasized by her posture and placement within the composition.

Peter Quivey was a California pioneer who fought in the Mexican-American War before settling in San Jose. This portrait presents the subject as mediating between the frontier and civilization through contrasting details such as the primitive knife and the sophisticated revolver, and the wild mountain lion and the trained hunting dog. Quivey’s two identities—as a frontiersman and as an art patron—reveal the competing social and cultural agendas that coexisted in Gold Rush California.

During the Civil War, both free blacks from the North and escaped slaves from the South (known as “contrabands”) served as mule drivers in the Union army quartermaster’s corps, which was responsible for moving supplies. Homer represented four men resting in the sun, awaiting orders to move camp. Their companion pokes his head out from the tent, staring at the viewer, who intrudes on their nap. His penetrating gaze acknowledges our presence and further connects us to the scene.

This painting depicts “boiling day,” when the season’s first harvest of maple tree sap was heated to produce syrup or sugar. Community members have gathered near the hot iron cauldron to talk, play music, dance, and eat. This image would have offered urban viewers a respite from imagery of the Civil War, though one Vermonter noted that maple sugar “is a product of our state, and it is never tinctured with the sweat, and the groans, and the tears, and the blood of the poor slave.”

Although most of the architecture in this scene is American, the two castle-like structures in the background may have been inspired by the artist’s native Germany. Huge’s idealized inventory of life in a New England town epitomizes the values and rewards of American democracy, symbolized by the neoclassical city hall. However, the smoking volcano (probably inspired by Italy’s Mount Vesuvius) that looms over the town serves as a reminder that nature has the ultimate power over civilization.

This depiction of the Central Pacific Railroad’s western terminus in Sacramento emphasizes the mingling of people from different cultural and economic backgrounds. In the foreground, a carriage meets its finely dressed passengers, while at the far right a Chinese laborer carries a heavy load. Sacramento’s status as a growing frontier town is suggested by the presence of a hardware store advertising building supplies.