In the decade following the Civil War, agriculture supplanted mining as California’s dominant industry. By 1881, four million acres of wheat (termed “grower’s gold” in the press) were under cultivation; valued at $34 million, wheat was worth twice that of the gold mined the same year. Hahn’s panoramic view of a wheat harvest in the Sacramento River Valley celebrates a modern—and mechanized—agricultural production in California, widely deemed the “cornucopia of the world.”

The art historian Patricia Hills once described this painting: “Here one is tempted to see the window as a symbol of a world beyond the kitchen, the sewing room, and the nursery, inaccessible to the young woman.” Do you see this window as a metaphor, or as an ordinary domestic detail? Johnson’s mastery is clear in the multiple possible interpretations of this painting—the viewer can see what they want in the woman’s pensive expression, the humble interior, and the snowfall outside.

The art historian Patricia Hills once described this painting: “Here one is tempted to see the window as a symbol of a world beyond the kitchen, the sewing room, and the nursery, inaccessible to the young woman.” Do you see this window as a metaphor, or as an ordinary domestic detail? Johnson’s mastery is clear in the multiple possible interpretations of this painting—the viewer can see what they want in the woman’s pensive expression, the humble interior, and the snowfall outside.

During the summer of 1915, Dixon traveled to Arizona with his wife and daughter. He spent time sketching and painting in the area around the Grand Canyon, eventually painting around sixty canvases inspired by the experience. In a 1968 review, one critic described the works from this period, which feature the bright palette and broken color of French Impressionism, “it’s almost as if Monet wore out on the range.”

Groll’s painting of Yellowstone’s Morning Glory Spring shows a well-known hot spring in the park’s Upper Geyser Basin. The pool was originally named in the 1880s by the wife of an assistant park superintendent, who called it Convolutus, after the Latin name for the bright blue flower that the pool resembles. Groll’s closely cropped image of the spring balances on the edge between topographical reporting and lyrical abstraction—perhaps making the pool’s resemblance to a flower even clearer.

Dixon once wrote about his deeply held feelings about art and nature: “Out of the sanity which usually comes to the artist when he returns to Nature and isolates himself from current fashions in art theory—out of the effect to go direct to his source of interest and interpret subject and sensation without reference to the mode in art—there comes an assurance that art is related to something larger than art, that it is, after all, but one of the functions of life.”

Fuller was involved with the artists’ colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, a special atmosphere where artists worked together against a backdrop of theater, poetry, and gardening. This portrait shows Ebba Bohm, a Swedish model who lived with the Fuller family in Cornish, as she contemplates a vase of irises, lost in an idealized world of the artist’s making. Her kimono and the vase of flowers allude to Asian aesthetics, which influenced many American painters at the time.

This painting is one of two works on the same panel—the reverse side features a cityscape. The use of both sides of the panel is evidence of Zorach’s poverty and the scarcity of art materials he had access to during this period. Painted on the bottom of an old drawer, this Madonna holds a stylized lily up toward a light, perhaps from the sun or moon. The spire of the church behind her may have been based on Provincetown’s picturesque Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, which was built in 1847.

Hill often painted vast landscapes, with expansive vistas and figures dwarfed by the scenery. The view here has been identified as the San Pedro Creek valley—we, the viewers, are standing on the western side of the mid-Peninsula ridge, looking out toward the Pacific Ocean in late spring or early summer. Trees and scrub open up towards a bridle path crossing the scene, framed by the trees at left and the outcropping of rocks on the right.

In this untitled landscape of 1922, Obata demonstrated the combined influences of impressionistic Japanese morotai painting and American Impressionism and Tonalism. Here, aqueous washes of black sumi ink poetically evoke, rather than topographically depict, the ethereal landscape of coastal California. This stylistic unification of East and West reflects Obata’s commitment to a global view of art, which he celebrated by cofounding the East West Art Society in 1921.