Born in Chicago, Carr studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, returning to Chicago by 1880. In 1881, he moved to New York, regularly exhibiting thereafter at the National Academy of Design. He traveled to Mexico in the 1880s in search of subjects, and did a number of paintings of the Spanish-America War in Cuba in 1896, but he was best known for a series of paintings of rural Georgia life done in the early 1890s. These paintings were described in an article by Marguerite Tracy in {The Quarterly Illustrator} in 1894 as being the logical-and almost sole-successor to that time of Eastman Johnson’s and Winslow Homer’s Southern genre paintings. They were all painted in the vicinity of Tallapoosa, Georgia, where Carr had moved in 1891 in order to portray, in the words of the article, "the picturesque side of Georgia life," from the "open routine of the plantations" to the "irregular work of the moonshiners." Like Tallapoosa, Black Mountain was an excursion stop on the railroad that skirted the Blue Ridge Mountains. Carr no doubt stopped here en route to Tallapoosa.

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Margaret Law was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who was a former chaplain in the Confederate Army. Her family was a prominent one in upstate South Carolina, and Law was well-educated before she began her career as an artist and teacher. After graduating from Converse College in Spartanburg in 1895, she continued her studies at the Art Students League and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Among her teachers were William Merritt Chase, Charles Hawthorne, Robert Henri, and Andre L’Hote. Her first job after World War I was as an art teacher at Bryn Mawr in Baltimore. While living in Maryland, Law’s style became more expressive and spontaneous. Most of her work began on-site with a palette knife. These studies were then refined in the studio into finished prints or paintings. Though clearly devoted to the themes of American Scene painting, Law incorporated modernism into her work through her repetition of forms, simplified composition, and vibrant color. Interest in real-life situations is common among students of Ashcan School founder Robert Henri, and this interest is reflected in the titles of Law’s works, most of which were created long before the American Scene idealization of the worker during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1936 Law returned to South Carolina where she taught school and was eventually named art supervisor for the Spartanburg School District. Remembered by friends and family as a person of "boundless enthusiasm," Law frequently did what were considered outrageous things for a lady of her upbringing. During her seventies, she learned to tap dance, and she drove across Mexico alone. It is said that she would paint on anything available, including the cardboard from shirt packages. Taken from: Worksong, The Greenville County Museum of Art, 1990.

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Nell Choate Jones was born in Hawkinsville, Georgia, the daughter of a former Confederate captain. When he died in 1884, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she lived until her death at age 101. For many years Jones taught elementary school, but in the 1920s she began studying art, encouraged by her husband, the painter and etcher, Eugene A Jones. She studied at the Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, and with Fred Boston, John Carlson and Ralph Johonnot. She and her husband exhibited jointly at Holt Gallery in 1927, and her impressionist scenes of France, Italy and Brooklyn won considerable acclaim. In 1929 she won a scholarship to the art school at Fontainbleau, France, where she spent a year, then studying in England before returning to the United States. Jones and her husband summered at the art colony of Woodstock, New York, and she spent time among the Quieres Indians of New Mexico. It was a return to her native Georgia in 1936, to bury her sister, that provided her with inspiration for the next two decades. Her paintings of the South are in an individualized, expressionist style, characterized by simplification of forms, rhythmic designs, and vibrant use of color for emotional effects. Jones exhibited throughout the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as in Canada, France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Greece and Japan. Her work is represented in many museums, including the High Museum in Atlanta and the Fort Worth Art Museum.

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 Born in Naples, Nicolino Calyo was an accomplished American nineteenth century view painter who brought the discipline of his classical European training to vibrant portrayals of the American scene. He studied at the Naples Academy, where he learned Neoclassical, Italian, and Dutch landscape techniques and traditions. Calyo fled Italy in 1821, having participated in an unsuccessful rebellion against Ferdinand I. Over the next several years, he traveled, sketched, and painted in Europe.

In 1834, Calyo settled in Baltimore. There, he held exhibitions of his large-scale European views before departing for Philadelphia and, ultimately, New York, which became his permanent home in 1835. Calyo arrived ready to produce views of the great fire of New York, which occurred on December 16-17, 1835, a pair of which were engraved as prints by William Bennett in 1836. Over the next several years, Calyo also created numerous characterizations of urban workers, vendors, and other street figures in the manner of Jacques Callot; a group of these were published in 1840 as the Cries of New York.

As an experienced landscape artist and traveler, Calyo made watercolor and gouache sketches on location, and this example attests to his itinerancy on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Some of the studies became sources for larger scale landscapes on paper, as well as the panoramas that he exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and New Orleans.

Calyo continued to be active in scenic painting through the 1850s. From known works, he appears to have done less painting during the succeeding decades before his death in 1884. Calyo remained cosmopolitan and international in perspective and politics during his entire lifetime.

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Palmer Schoppe was one of the group of artists who participated in the cultural flowering of the 1920s through 1940 that is called the Charleston Renaissance. In his choice of subjects and of media (lithographs and paintings) Schoppe contributed to a nationwide interest in Lowcountry life and culture. Born in 1912 at Wood Cross, Utah, he grew up in Santa Monica, California, where he received his first artistic training. Schoppe later studied at the Yale School of Fine Art and Art Students League of New York City. His career has centered in Los Angeles. He he has taught at the Art Center School and University of Southern California Film Department, and worked as a staff member at Walt Disney Studios. Schoppe visited Charleston and nearby sea islands in 1934. He was an acquaintance of Dubose Heyward, Alfred Hutty, and others who were recording in art and literature the culture of local African Americans and of the former planter aristocracy. While in the area he prepared studies for a series of lithographs that he called "A Low Country Portfolio."

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Born at Table Rock, Madison County, Ohio, on 23 March 1865, Paul Sawyier lived in Frankfort, Kentucky as a young man. He studied painting with Thomas S. Noble at the Cincinnati Art School in 1884, and was a student of William Merritt Chase at the New York Art Students League from 1889-1890. He returned to Covington, Kentucky, and studied for a year under Frank Duveneck. Some of Sawyier’s paintings represented the state of Kentucky at the Columbian Exhibition of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. In 1908 while living at Frankfort, the artist moved aboard a houseboat on the Kentucky River, which served as his home and traveling studio until 1913. Moving up and down the river, Sawyier painted views of Camp Nelson, Shakertown, and other river towns and locales, photographical local scenes which he later used to create paintings. In 1913 Sawyier moved to Brooklyn, New York, and two years later settled in the Catskill Mountain towns of High Mount and Fleischmanns. There, with the aid of his photographs, he continued to paint impressionist Kentucky landscapes until his death on 8 November 1917. Sawyier created as many as 3,000 original paintings during his life. In his early years he was a watercolorist and painted some portraits but the majority of his mature works were landscapes executed in oils.

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Often referred to as "the American Van Gogh," Reynolds Beal was a leading early twentieth century impressionist. His lifelong love of the water was borne out in brilliant seascapes and marine subjects, while more whimsical works executed in lively colors identified him as an aesthetic adventurer. 

Born to an affluent New York City family, Beal studied naval architecture at Cornell University. Following his graduation, he toured the great art capitals of Europe before entering formal study with William Merritt Chase on Long Island in the early 1890s. Liberated by independent means and encouraged by his younger brother, the well known painter Gifford Beal, Reynolds was able to travel extensively throughout the United States, Caribbean, Central America, and Europe, often in the company of leading artists such as Childe Hassam, H. Dudley Murphy, and William Glackens. Based in Rockport, Massachusetts, he also worked extensively with Henry Ward Ranger during the first decade of the new century.

Beal had his first one-man show in 1905 and, in 1909, was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design. In 1919, Beal was one of few Americans selected to exhibit at the Luxembourg Museum, a high honor for artists of the day. Progressive in both spirit and technique, he was one of the founders of the Society of Independent Artists and the New Society of Artists. 

Depicted in a crisp palette that conveys a sense of brisk ocean breezes, Atlantic waters play a central role in Beal’s canvases, Atlantic waters play a central role in Beal’s canvases. In the 1910s and 1920s, he painted a series of light-hearted, spontaneous scenes of traveling circuses. 

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Born in Warrenton, Virginia, Richard Norris Brooke was educated at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. Following studies with Edmund Bonsall and James Lambdin at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he also exhibited, he taught at several schools, including the Virginia Military Institute (1871-1872). From 1873 until 1876, Brooke served as U.S. Consul at La Rochelle, France, and subsequently studied under Benjamin Constant and Leon Bonnat in Paris. On his return to the United States he settled in Washington, D.C., on Vernon Row at 10th and Pennsylvania, and painted two well received genre pictures of African-American life, "The Pastoral Visit" (1880; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and "Dog Swap" (1881; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.). Brooke’s interest in black genre subjects was successful but short-lived. After 1881, he devoted himself almost entirely to landscape painting, forming, with William Holmes, Edmund Messer, James Moser, Max Weyl and others, the "Washington Landscape School." Inspired by the French Barbizon masters and their Dutch and American followers, many of whom were represented in the Thomas E. Waggaman collection begun by Brooke in 1882, the group recorded the fast-fading arcadian beauties at the Capitol, especially around Rock Creek Park and along the Potomac. In later years he shared studio space with Max Weyl in what were known as the "Barbizon Studios" near the White House, and lived with his nephew in Warrenton.

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Born in Vienna, Austria, Rudolph F. Ingerle came to the United States with his parents when he was twelve years old, eventually settling in Chicago where he had the opportunity to attend Schmidt’s Art Academy and later the Art Institute. He studied and sketched the paintings in the Institute’s museum collection, and later advocated such careful observation of works of art as the best approach to becoming a great artist. Ingerle allied himself with T. C. Steele and others in forming the Indiana School of painting in Brown County, and then joined the Ozark School which developed shortly thereafter. Around 1920, he decided that he would like to see the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, and found the area so inspiring that after his initial visit he returned several months of each year for the rest of his life. He often based himself at Bryson City on the Tuckaseegee River. His landscapes of the area as well as his penetrating character studies of the mountain earned him the appellation, "Painter of the Smokies." Ingerle responded with awe and reverence to the Great Smoky Mountains, and his paintings are a legacy to a way of life which has all but vanished, and to a landscape which remains as beautiful as it was when the artist first saw it. Thanks to his personal efforts as well as many others, the Great Smoky Mountains became a national park.

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Rudolph Lux practiced the very distinguished European art form of painting and gilding porcelain, which enjoyed very little note in mid-nineteenth century America. Never the less, he is considered to be the most successful artist of his type working in the Old South. His highly detailed and well-wrought images of figures both civic and domestic were much prized in New Orleans, where he worked in both the French Quarter and the American section. After the capitulation of New Orleans in 1862 Lux painted several members of the occupying forces, notably Nathaniel Banks, Benjamin F. Butler, and David Farragut. But prior to that time, internal evidence on this plate indicates that he created a series of works commemorating secession. This particular plate has an iconography composed of eight stars representing the eight Southern States who formed the Confederacy: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, and Virginia. The member of a prominent Jewish family and an equally powerful political figure in his own right, Judah P. Benjamin was an appropriate subject for Lux. Having served Louisiana as a senator, he subsequently served as Secretary of War and Secretary of State for the Confederate States of America from March 1862 until the demise of the C.S.A. in April 1865. Benjamin was widely considered to be the most intelligent and effective member of President Davis’ cabinet. Confederate historian Clement Eaton has written that Benjamin was "extremely versatile, he had the virtue of detachment and made a judicious counselor." Unregenerate and certainly unreconstructed, Benjamin fled to England after the war where he practiced law until his death.

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