The great subject of much of American painting is, of course, the country itself.(EDITOR'S LETTER)

This month ANTIQUES forsakes three-dimensional objects for its annual American painting issue. Until nearly forty years ago, as Martin Filler reminds us in his tribute to the art historian Barbara Novak, American painting, at least nineteenth-century American painting, was not up for serious consideration. Since then, interest in American art and American artists (as well as the reputation of our decorative arts) has grown to the point that major museums in New York, Boston, Kansas City, and elsewhere have embarked on ambitious renovations of their American collection space, most of which will open in the next year or two. The dynamic Seattle Art Museum, home now to a cache of major works by Church, Bierstadt, Hopper, and others, did not even have an American department until 2004, but that is another story, colorfully told here by Tim Appelo ("Seattle goes boom") and Patricia Junker ("American art and the Seattle Art Museum").

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The great subject of much of American painting is, of course, the country itself. Who apart from painters (or poets) have taken the measure of our brave new world without in some way betraying it? Thomas Moran engaged the national experience most famously in his western landscapes, but also quite evocatively, as Elizabeth Johns explains, in a gorgeous sky of smoke and steam rising from the sugar refineries in Communipaw, New Jersey ("Poetry of the air").

Peter Hassrick's account of the career of Ernest Blumenschein ...