Written from aesthetic, sociopolitical, cultural, and literary perspectives, The Cultured Canvas explores myriad ways in which American visual culture can be evaluated through newly conceived thematic and ideological approaches. This book moves beyond our accepted notion of the oil painting on canvas to consider the term as both a literal and figurative surface upon which artists construct or construe the landscape as an intellectual, cultural, or physical entity. It provides an innovative reevaluation of traditional schools of thought concerning the Hudson River School, Luminism, and artists of the Civil War era. The Cultured Canvas serves as a textbook as well as to appeal to scholarly and popular audiences. As interdisciplinary emphases are employed with increasing frequency in arts and humanities courses, the breadth and depth of topics covered in this collection will provide a much-needed text for college-level courses in American art history, nineteenth-century American studies, and landscape studies, in addition to serving as a complementary textbook for courses in American literature and culture.