The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880Between 1830 and 1880, oil sketches by American landscape painters gradually emerged from the privacy of the studio as desirable and marketable works of art in their own right. Landscape painting was of prime importance in America during the mid nineteenth century, and artists such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Sanford Robinson Gifford traveled to distant, often inaccessible places in search of new images. The hazards