The most famous American artists of all time

The foremost American portraitist of his day, Gilbert Stuart painted Presidents (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison) and European Royalty (King George III of England, Louis XVI of France) alike, but he’s best known for his unfinished likeness of George Washington. Begun in 1796, the painting was meant as a half-figure rendering of the first President, but Stuart only got as far as completing Washington's head and face. Nonetheless, the image became so iconic that an engraving of it has graced the one-dollar bill for more than a century. Stuart lived and worked variously in London, Dublin, Philadelphia and New York, before ending his career in Boston, where he died in 1828.

Gilbert Stuart, Portrait of George Washington, 1796
Photograph: Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston/National Portrait Gallery Washington D.C.

Americans tend to mythologize the country’s landscape and Frederic Church was among the artists who helped to shape that view with canvases that brought America’s great outdoors indoors. Church was a member of the Hudson River School, a group of painters who focused their attentions on the sublime wonders of the eponymous waterway. He also painted views of the Catskills, Niagara Falls and the coast of Maine, as well scenes of exotic locales around the world, from the Aegean Sea to the Andes Mountains.

Frederic Church, Niagara, 1857
Photograph: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Besides creating iconic works, like the portrait of his mother, Whistler led one of the more colorful lives in 19th-century art. Born in Massachusetts, he lived as a child in St. Petersburg, Russia, and later entered West Point in 1851, from where he was expelled by none other than Robert E. Lee. Whistler first established his reputation in Paris, but worked mainly in London, where among other things, he sued the critic John Ruskin for writing a negative review of his work, a case he lost; the legal fees racked up during the trial eventually forced Whistler into bankruptcy. Then there was his imbroglio with a patron, Frederick Richards Leyland, over the design of a Leyland’s dining room. Leyland tasked Whistler with completing its décor, but when the artist painted over the room’s antique leather wallpaper, Leyland, infuriated, cut off ties to him. Whistler’s irascibility proved fatal to another relationship, this time with Oscar Wilde. Nonetheless, the appreciation for Whistler’s genius prevailed, and in 1940, he was commemorated on a United States postage stamp.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, 1871
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Wikimedia Commons/Musée d'Orsay

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Cassatt is the best known of the female painters associated with Impressionism. She initially studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia before moving to Paris in 1866. A friend and admirer of Degas, Cassatt became known for intimate domestic scenes with women and girls as the main focus. Later in her career, her work was shaped by the period fashion in France for Japanese art and design. By 1914, she was almost blind, and stopped making art. She would live for another dozen years before dying at Château de Beaufresne, outside Paris.

Mary Cassatt, The Boating Party, 1893–1894
Photograph: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Though he lived and worked in Europe for most of his life, John Singer Sargent’s work is closely associated with America’s Gilded Age. He was a internationally celebrated as a portraitist, known for his fluid handling of paint, whose subjects came from the ranks of high society in Boston, New York, Paris and London. His most famous painting is his full-length portrait, Madame X, which captures the American wife of a French banker in a black gown that contrasted with the milky color of her arms, shoulders and face, shown in profile. Considered a masterpiece today, Madame X was roundly derided upon its unveiling at the French Salon of 1884, one of many appearances there that Sargent made while working in Paris, where he also was accepted into the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. His sitters included Presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson) and titans of industry (John D. Rockefeller).

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X, 1884
Photograph: Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art/Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund

Hopper’s enigmatic paintings look into the hollow core of the American experience—the alienation and loneliness that represents the flip side of to our religious devotion to individualism and the pursuit of an often-elusive happiness. In compositions such as Nighthawks, Automat and Office in a Small City, he captures stillness weighed down by despair, his subjects trapped in the limbo between aspiration and reality. His landscapes are similarly suffused with a sense that America’s open spaces are as purgatorial as they are limitless.

Edward Hopper, Self Portrait, 1906

O’Keeffe is known, in the minds of many, for a widespread misconception that her paintings were thinly veiled renderings of vaginas. O’Keeffe rightly detested this idea as her intention was to bridge the gap between abstraction and representation rather than create symbols of female empowerment. For one thing, she was plenty empowered in her own right, though her marriage to photography pioneer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was a torrid, if ultimately unhappy, relationship, due to his extramarital affairs. Nonetheless, her artistic career came to overshadow his. Though she painted scenes in various locations around the U.S., O’Keeffe’s work is most often associated with New Mexico, where she lived between 1934 and her death in 1986.

Photograph: Anonymous/AP/REX/Shutterstock 

Hampered by alcoholism, self-doubt and clumsiness as a conventional painter, Pollock transcended his limitations in a brief but incandescent period between 1947 and 1950 when he produced the drip abstractions that cemented his renown. Eschewing the easel to lay his canvases fait on the floor, he used house paint straight from the can, flinging and dribbling thin skeins of pigment that left behind a concrete record of his movements—a technique that would become known as action painting.

Jackson Pollock, Reflection of the Big Dipper, 1947
Photograph: History Archive/REX/Shutterstock

Technically, Warhol didn’t invent Pop Art, but he became the Pope of Pop by taking the style out of the art world and bringing it into the world of fashion and celebrity. Starting out as a commercial artist, he brought the ethos of advertising into fine art, even going so far as to say, “Making money is art.” Such sentiments blew away the existential pretensions of Abstract Expressionism. Although he’s famous for subjects such as Campbell’s Soup, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, his greatest creation was himself.

Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Marilyn Diptych, 1962
Photograph: Tate, London, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York