Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies

A fresh look at the global dimensions of US painting from the 1850s to 1898.

Painting US Empire is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the globe in the nineteenth century. In this work, art historian Maggie M. Cao crafts a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century US painters’ complicity with and resistance to ascendant US imperialism, offering eye-opening readings of canonical works, landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lifes of i...