This handsome retrospective offers an affordable treasury of nearly 100 works by the nation's best and most popular artists. Ranging from the colonial era to the early twentieth century, it features drawings by anonymous folk artists as well as such famous figures as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, Stuart Davis, Rockwell Kent, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

Skyscrapers, smokestacks, traffic, and other city scenes begin the collection, in a sequence of images that capture the vitality of urban life, including John Marin's Woolworth Building and Brooklyn Bridge, Joseph Stella's Pittsburgh Winter, and Adolf Dehn's Art Lovers and Artistes' Café. Lithographs of landscapes and country vignettes feature the works of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and other noted Regionalists. A series of portraits includes a chalk drawing by John Singleton Copley of a nobleman as well as a study by Thomas Eakins for his masterpiece, The Gross Clinic. The anthology concludes with an appealing selection of folk and fantasy art, inspired by scenes from mythology, Shakespeare, and the Bible.