ABSTRACT
This essay maps key settings (the Tenth Street Studio) and events (the 1864 Metropolitan Fair) through which visual culture produced Western landscapes as icons of American nationality during an era of consolidation and conflict. It includes “high” and “commercial” image-makers and entrepreneurs: painter Albert Bierstadt, muralist Emanuel Leutze, landscape theorist Frederick Law Olmsted, lithographers Currier Ives, and popular illustrators Thomas Nast and John Gast, whose American Progress was reproduced for a best-selling railroad tourism guide. The essay investigates the images and practices of these visual makers as they constructed the West as national space.
