American Visions The Epic History of Art in America

"The Wilderness and the West" discusses the work of landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and the Luminists, who viewed the natural world as "the fingerprint of God's creation," and of those who recorded America's westward expansion - George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Remington - and the accompanying shift in the perception of the Indian, from noble savage to outright demon.