Grant Wesley Hamming

This dissertation examines the colony of American artists who worked in Düsseldorf, Germany, in the 1840s and 1850s. It argues that Emanuel Leutze, Richard Caton Woodville, and Albert Bierstadt, among others, reveal the deep interconnections among American, German, and wider European intellectual and cultural life, connections that have often been obscured by a nationalist bent in American art historical scholarship. Addressing such pressing concerns as the meaning of freedom, liberal revolution, the social disjunctions caused by technological change, and the fate of indigenous peoples in the face of Euro-American conquest, these painters present a strong argument for a reevaluation of the American place in the artistic and intellectual culture of the Atlantic before the Civil War.