This catalog, together with the scholarly apparatus also available on this site, offers both art historians and the general public access to the most comprehensive research on the American paintings previously in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Annotated essays by prominent and emerging scholars present 102 of the most significant works alongside color plates. Complete curatorial data document the remaining 422 paintings in the collection. These paintings span genre and period, including iconic works of 19th-century landscape painting and portraiture, American impressionism, and early 20th-century realism. The introduction provides the first complete examination of the Corcoran’s history of collecting American art, traced back to its founding in 1869 by William Wilson Corcoran and discussed within the context of American art patronage and institutional collecting. (When the Corcoran Gallery of Art closed in 2014 the National Gallery of Art accessioned much of its collection and became custodian of its publications. This and other out-of-print Corcoran volumes have been made freely available as PDFs in an effort to perpetuate the legacy of that institution.)