Frederic Church (American, 1826–1900)
Frederic Edwin Church was born into a privileged family from Hartford, Connecticut. In 1844, a family friend, Daniel Wadsworth, arranged for him to train with Thomas Cole, the celebrated landscape painter, in Catskill, New York. Under Cole's tutelage for two years, Church's artistic talents flourished and he began to exhibit his paintings at the National Academy of Design, where he experienced commercial and critical success. In 1850, Church made his first trip to Maine, where over the next three decades he would frequently spend his summers at Mount Desert Island and Mount Katahdin. His magnificent 1857 painting, Niagara, quickly established him as the foremost landscape painter in America. Searching for dramatic and unusual scenery, Church traveled to Europe, Jamaica, North Africa, and the Middle East between 1867 and 1869. After these foreign excursions, the artist began plans for a new home overlooking the Hudson River and his beloved Catskill mountains. This architectural fancy of Eastern inspiration, named Olana, became the site for Church's later works, which were breathtaking studies of sunsets and clouds in changing weather conditions.

Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
Born in Boston, Winslow Homer's artistic career began at the age of nineteen as an apprentice at J. H. Bufford's lithography shop. In 1859 he began work in the fast-paced publishing industry as an illustrative reporter for Harper's Weekly in New York City. Homer gained acclaim through his depictions of the Civil War, which also became subjects for his paintings, such as Prisoners from the Front (1866). Active as an illustrator throughout the 1870s, Homer traveled extensively, capturing scenes of well-known tourist destinations throughout the Northeast. He made his first trip to the Adirondacks in 1870 and returned to the region many times throughout his career to capture the rugged life of the outdoors. While vacationing in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he began painting with watercolor, the medium for which he is best known today. In order to study watercolor techniques, Homer traveled to Tynemouth, England where the subject matter of his paintings changed to an exploration of the tensions between human toil and natural conditions. In 1883, the artist moved permanently to Prouts Neck, Maine, a remote summer resort, where he built a studio along the shores of the Atlantic. By the time of his death in 1910, Homer was revered as the nation's foremost painter and his works were represented in more public collections than any other American artist.

Thomas Moran (American, 1837–1926)
Born in England, Thomas Moran had immigrated with his family to Philadelphia by 1844. As a young man, Moran apprenticed to the firm of Philadelphia wood-engravers Scattergood & Telfer. Beginning in 1856, Moran showed his work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, where he was later elected an Academician. He frequently traveled to Europe to exhibit his works internationally, and also made a trip to England, where he studied works by Turner which affected both the technical and artistic nature of his work. In 1871, Moran accompanied the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, led by Ferdinand V. Hayden, on an exploration of the Yellowstone region, working closely with photographer William Henry Jackson. Upon his return in 1872, he painted his first grand scale canvas of the West, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which was exhibited in New York and Washington D.C. and purchased by Congress the same year. Moran's growing reputation as a landscape painter enabled him to accompany the government survey expedition of the Grand Canyon led by John Wesley Powell in 1873. During the 1870s and 1880s, Moran's wood-engraved illustrations appeared in major magazines and journals which disseminated his images of the American West and cemented his role as a preeminent painter of Western landscape. Moran's magnificent paintings of the scenic West were instrumental to the formation of the National Parks.