Emanuel Leutze's 1851 monument to nerve stages the icy 1776 river crossing as sheer will. The heroic standing pose and the flag shown are patriotic invention, not eyewitness fact.

John Trumbull's 1818 Rotunda canvas shows the drafting committee presenting its text, not the signing. It froze a committee meeting into the nation's founding image.

John Singleton Copley's 1768 portrait shows the silversmith in shirtsleeves at his bench, teapot in hand — a working craftsman granted the dignity of a gentleman's portrait.

Archibald Willard's 1876 centennial crowd-pleaser marches three generations — a boy, a man and an old veteran — as fife and drum. Sentimental, deliberate flag-waving myth-making.

Gilbert Stuart's 1796 full-length of Washington borrows a Roman orator's gesture and civilian black dress. A rainbow behind signals the storm of war finally passing.

Copley's 1778 shocker turns a true rescue in Havana harbour into a Baroque thriller — and centres a Black sailor at the composition's apex, rare for its moment.

John Trumbull's 1786 canvas of Bunker Hill makes defeat noble, its dying patriot lit like a fallen classical hero while a redcoat's bayonet is turned aside.

Benjamin West's 1772 scene of William Penn bargaining with the Lenape sells a myth of fair, peaceful dealing — an origin story the colonists preferred to their record.

Howard Chandler Christy's 1940 mural in the Capitol gives 1787 a golden, orderly grandeur — Washington presiding as the framers step up to sign the young republic into being.

George Caleb Bingham's 1852 masterpiece paints democracy as it really looked: rowdy, boozy, persuasive, half-comic. The whole town funnels down to one man casting one vote.

Thomas Cole's 1836 view from Mount Holyoke splits the canvas: storm-lashed wilderness on the left, tamed sunlit farmland on the right, with the tiny painter perched at the divide.

Asher B. Durand's 1849 tribute sets painter Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant on a Catskill ledge — art and poetry joined by shared reverence for the wild.

Frederic Edwin Church's 1857 canvas puts you on the very brink, no foreground to stand on. It made the falls a national icon and Church America's most famous painter overnight.

Church's 1860 sky burns blood-red over an empty, silent land. Painted on the eve of the Civil War, its unpeopled grandeur reads now as a nation holding its breath.

Albert Bierstadt's 1863 blockbuster (Lander's Peak) stacks Alpine peaks over a Native encampment, glowing like a stage set. Sublime spectacle that also sold westward expansion.

Bierstadt painted this 1868 vision in Rome from memory, inventing a heavenly, luminous California to dazzle European eyes. Awe over accuracy — a paradise made to advertise.

Thomas Moran's 1872 canvas travelled to Congress and helped persuade it to create the first national park that same year. A painting that literally shaped the map.

John Frederick Kensett's 1869 luminist view dissolves rock, water and haze into radiant stillness. No drama, no story — just light made almost holy.

Robert S. Duncanson's 1851 Ohio idyll is a Hudson River School gem by the first African American landscape painter to win international fame — too often left out of the story.

Thomas Cole's 1836 five-part cycle runs from savage wilderness to imperial splendour to ruin — a warning to the young republic that all empires rot. The thesis of the sublime.

Emanuel Leutze's 1861 Capitol study crowns pioneers on a mountain pass gazing at a golden Pacific. Manifest Destiny as sacred procession — the state's own self-portrait.

George Caleb Bingham's 1845 canvas floats a trapper, his son and a chained black animal through golden river mist — the frontier as dreamlike, uneasy stillness.

Bingham's 1852 canvas leads Boone and his wife through the Cumberland Gap like a holy family entering the promised land — westward migration painted as scripture.

Frederic Remington's 1889 breakthrough sends eight riders galloping straight at you, guns blazing, pursuers behind. Kinetic, cinematic — the template for a century of Westerns.

Remington's 1895 elegy is quiet and cold: two riders at a wire gate, the open range fenced off behind them. The mythic cowboy painted at the moment of his own extinction.

Charles M. Russell's 1905 canvas of the expedition meeting the Flathead people places Sacagawea front and centre as interpreter — the woman on whom the whole encounter turns.

Bierstadt's 1888 canvas heaps a doomed hunt with hundreds of bison already vanishing. Painted as the great herds collapsed, it mourns and mythologises in the same breath.

George Catlin's 1837 double portrait shows the Nakoda man Wi-jún-jon proud in native dress, then returned from Washington a ruined, mocked dandy — assimilation's cruel cost.

Charles M. Russell's 1897 cowboy scene has a rider turning a straying steer back through deep snow — real ranch work by a painter who had actually cowboyed for years.

John Gast's 1872 allegory floats a giant 'Columbia' westward, stringing telegraph wire while Native peoples and bison flee into the dark ahead. Manifest Destiny, undisguised.

Grant Wood's 1930 pair are farmer and daughter, not husband and wife — modelled on his own sister and his dentist. The most parodied image in US art began half as satire.

James McNeill Whistler titled it Arrangement in Grey and Black — an exercise in pure form. The public ignored him and adopted it as the universal icon of motherhood.

John Singer Sargent's 1884 portrait of Virginie Gautreau caused such scandal in Paris that he repainted a slipped strap and fled to London. Later, he called it his finest work.

Sargent's 1882 group portrait scatters four girls across a vast, shadowed room. The youngest sits in light; the eldest recede into dark — childhood dissolving before us.

Thomas Eakins' 1875 canvas puts a surgeon mid-operation, bloody hand raised, lecturing students. Too graphic for its day, it is now hailed as the great American painting of science.

Eakins' 1871 portrait of his rower friend on the Schuylkill is built on ruthless perspective — and hides Eakins himself rowing in the middle distance. Science as intimacy.

Winslow Homer's 1876 catboat of boys leaning into a fair wind, painted for the centennial, reads as national optimism after civil war — the young republic sailing into open sea.

Mary Cassatt's 1894 canvas, bold as a Japanese print, seats a mother and child before a dark-backed oarsman. America's great Impressionist made everyday intimacy monumental.

Charles Willson Peale's 1822 self-portrait lifts a curtain on his natural-history museum — mastodon bones and all. The self-made American as collector, scientist and showman.

Andrew Wyeth's 1948 image of a woman in a field, dragging herself toward a far grey house, turns disability and longing into the loneliest, most American of horizons.

Edward Hopper's 1942 diner glows on a dark corner with no visible door in or out. Four strangers under harsh light: the loneliness of the American city, distilled.

Hopper's 1930 row of shopfronts sits empty in low raking light — a barber's pole, a hydrant, no people. He makes an ordinary block feel like a held breath.

Hopper's 1927 lone woman sits over coffee in a fluorescent automat, night pressing at the glass. Modern convenience turned into modern solitude, cup by cup.

John Sloan's 1912 Ashcan interior warms a men-only saloon with amber light and easy company — the immigrant city's living room, painted with real affection.

George Bellows' 1913 canvas crams a Lower East Side block with laundry, children and heat. The teeming tenement as a modern cliff face — humane, never sentimental.

Bellows' 1909 boxing scene blurs two fighters into one violent knot under the lights. Painted at a private club (a 'stag'), it caught the city's raw physical thrill.

John Sloan's 1922 view from his window sweeps a wet street, an elevated train and the lit towers beyond — the modern metropolis as glittering, rain-slicked promise.

Charles Demuth's 1928 'poster portrait' turns a William Carlos Williams poem — a fire truck racing through rain — into pure Precisionist geometry. Word, machine and paint fused.

Joseph Stella's 1920 canvas splinters the bridge into stained-glass shards of cable and light — a Futurist cathedral for the machine age, America worshipping its own engineering.

Georgia O'Keeffe's 1927 skyscraper rises black against the night, its windows blazing, a red neon sign glowing 'Stieglitz'. She made the tower as awesome as any desert or peak.

Thomas Anshutz's 1880 canvas lines up mill hands washing and resting on their break — an unusually frank, sculptural look at industrial labour before it was a common subject.

George Bellows' 1912 waterfront pits tiny longshoremen and workhorses against a wall of steamships in bitter cold — human muscle dwarfed by the machinery of commerce.

Charles Sheeler's 1930 view of Ford's River Rouge plant is titled 'landscape' but shows no nature — only silos, smoke and rail. The factory as the new American wilderness.

From Thomas Hart Benton's 1930 'America Today' mural, this panel whirls boxers, dancers and stockbrokers together — the roaring 1920s at full tilt, months before the crash.

Benton's 1938 Missouri harvest ripples with muscular, almost boneless figures swinging scythes through rolling hills — rural labour turned into rhythm and dignity.

Alexandre Hogue's 1936 Dust Bowl allegory carves a woman's body into eroded, plough-scarred earth. Disaster blamed squarely on human greed, not just drought.

Isaac Soyer's 1937 canvas seats the jobless on hard chairs, staring at nothing, waiting for work that will not come. The Depression's grinding tedium, without melodrama.

William Gropper's 1939 mural surges with labourers raising a New Deal dam, bodies straining in unison — federal work programmes celebrated as collective muscle and hope.

John Steuart Curry's 1939 farm sits under a sky of massing storm and passing sun at once — the whole gamble of agriculture, weather and endurance, held in one long view.

Ben Shahn's 1932 painting mourns two executed Italian immigrants, their coffins flanked by smug officials. Labour, prejudice and American justice put brutally on trial.

Norman Rockwell's 1943 'Four Freedoms' panel stands one working man up to speak at a town meeting while neighbours listen. Democracy shown not as a slogan but as a room.

Rockwell's 1943 Thanksgiving table, grandmother lowering a turkey to a beaming family, became the defining picture of American abundance — and a target for parody ever since.

Rockwell's 1951 canvas sets an old woman and boy praying in a crowded, smoky diner while rough men watch, unsettled and softened. Faith framed by ordinary strangers.

John Steuart Curry's 1928 canvas dunks a convert in a farm water-trough as neighbours sing, a dove and sunbeam overhead. Rural revival faith painted with dead-straight sincerity.

Curry's 1929 canvas races a farm family to the storm cellar as a black funnel bears down — dog, baby, livestock and all. The plains as a place of constant, physical peril.

Grant Wood's 1939 canvas paints the invented cherry-tree story — Weems himself drawing back a curtain, little George given Washington's grown-up head. Myth shown as myth.

Wood's 1932 canvas skewers three pinch-faced patriotic-society matrons posing before Leutze's Delaware — a sly attack on hereditary smugness dressed as devotion.

Edward Hopper's 1940 lone filling station glows at the edge of dark woods, one attendant, one road. The American highway as a thin line of light against the wilderness.

Hopper's 1925 mansard house stranded behind a rail line — later the model for the Psycho house — is the whole American 19th century left stiffly, mournfully behind.

Rockwell's 1960 cover shows him painting himself while glancing in a mirror — and flattering the canvas version. America's storyteller caught happily inventing America.

Winslow Homer's 1876 canvas of two Black women in a cotton field, freed but landless, meets the viewer's eye with quiet gravity. Emancipation shadowed by unchanged toil.

Homer's 1899 canvas leaves a lone Black sailor adrift on a dismasted boat among sharks and a coming waterspout — a distant ship the only faint hope. Peril and endurance.

Henry Ossawa Tanner's 1893 canvas of an old man teaching a boy the banjo counters minstrel caricature with tenderness and dignity — the great work of the era's finest Black painter.

Tanner's 1894 canvas seats an old man and a boy in prayer over a meagre meal, lit like a Rembrandt. Ordinary Black domestic life given the weight of sacred art.

Aaron Douglas' 1934 mural series sweeps from Africa through slavery to freedom to Harlem in silhouetted, jazz-rhythm figures — the Harlem Renaissance painting its own long arc.

Archibald Motley's 1943 canvas swings a Chicago club into motion — red dresses, a jukebox, bodies dancing under electric colour. Black urban joy painted at full volume.

Jacob Lawrence's 1941 sixty-panel epic charts the Great Migration north in flat, bold shapes. Panel one — crowds streaming toward Chicago, New York, St. Louis — opens the exodus.

Lawrence's 1947 canvas sets Black carpenters amid bright planks and tools, constructing something unseen — a recurring image of a people building a future with their own hands.

Norman Rockwell's 1964 canvas walks six-year-old Ruby Bridges to a newly integrated school, guarded by marshals, a slur and a hurled tomato on the wall behind. Courage, painted plainly.

Faith Ringgold's 1967 canvas traps a Black man, a white man and a white woman behind a Stars and Stripes streaked with blood. The nation's promise and its wounds, in one image.

Jasper Johns' 1958 stacks three canvas flags front to back, the smallest jutting toward you. Is it patriotism, or an object about seeing? He leaves the question wide open.

Johns' 1955 canvas drains the flag of all colour — a ghostly, waxen white banner. The most loaded symbol in America, bleached into silence and left for you to fill.

Childe Hassam's 1917 canvas hangs American, British and French flags down Fifth Avenue as the US enters the Great War — Impressionist light turned to patriotic pageant.

Hassam's 1917 rain-blurred Fifth Avenue smears rows of flags into shimmering reflections on wet pavement. It has hung in the White House for decades as a portrait of resolve.

George Healy's 1868 canvas gathers Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and Admiral Porter in a steamboat cabin near the war's end, planning the peace — a rainbow of hope through the window.

Winslow Homer's 1866 canvas faces a crisp Union officer against three captured Confederates — defiance, weariness and youth. Two Americas eyeing each other across the divide.

Homer's 1865 canvas turns a returned soldier's back to us as he scythes wheat — sword into ploughshare, the fallen recalled by the felled grain. War's end as quiet labour.

Paul Philippoteaux's 1883 painting-in-the-round wraps 360 degrees of Pickett's Charge around the viewer. Before cinema, it was how America stood inside its own bloodiest day.

A carpenter in 1870s New York shaped a farm gate into a rippling Stars and Stripes. Anonymous, homemade patriotism — the flag as folk art, swinging on rural hinges.

Frederic Church's 1861 image reads the sunset itself as a torn flag — red streaks, white clouds, a corner of starry blue. Painted days after Fort Sumter: the Union as civil religion.

Jackson Pollock's 1950 poured canvas (Number 30) laces black, white and tan across seven feet of raw duck. No subject, no centre — just American space, all edge and energy.

Pollock's 1950 Number 1 shimmers with skeins of silver, pink and grey and his own handprints along the top. Apparent chaos resolving, up close, into a strange, breathing harmony.

Willem de Kooning's 1952 canvas rips a grinning, monstrous female idol out of scraped and slashed paint — abstraction and the figure locked in open violence. Deeply divisive still.

Mark Rothko's 1961 stacked veils of warm colour hover and pulse, meant to be seen up close until they swallow your field of view. Feeling engineered out of pure hue.

Barnett Newman's 1948 breakthrough splits a field of dark red with one ragged vertical 'zip'. That single line both divides the canvas and, he insisted, makes it whole — a genesis.

Franz Kline's 1950 sweeps a few huge black strokes across white — named for a locomotive he loved. Abstraction with the speed and weight of American industry behind it.

Andy Warhol's 1962 thirty-two canvases, one per flavour, hang like supermarket shelving in a gallery. High art and mass branding collapse into each other — and never fully separate again.

Warhol's 1962 grid repeats Monroe fifty times — vivid gold on the left, smeared and fading to grey on the right. Fame and death silkscreened side by side, weeks after she died.

Roy Lichtenstein's 1963 diptych blows a war-comic panel up to mural scale — a fighter jet, a red explosion, hand-painted Ben-Day dots. Pulp violence made cool, huge and ironic.

Jasper Johns' 1955 flag — newspaper soaked in encaustic wax, every stripe a made thing — asks if it is a flag or a painting. To picture America is to hand its own symbols back. The thesis.