19th Century American Paintings and Works on Paper

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For much of the century American painters sketched on paper and exhibited in oil. Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt sketched outdoors, then built large studio canvases from their studies. Paper gained status of its own after a society of watercolour painters formed in New York in 1866. Winslow Homer took up the medium seriously in 1873 and later painted fishing, hunting and Caribbean scenes in it, laying in transparent washes and scraping out highlights.

Etching revived in the same decades. James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Venice plates of 1879–80, printed with films of ink left on the copper, made each impression unique. By the 1880s oil painting had divided between the realism of Thomas Eakins, the broken brushwork of the American Impressionists and the dim landscapes of the Tonalists, while John Singer Sargent brought one fluent hand to society portraits and travel watercolours.