In a museum-quality, oversized book of over three hundred pages, John Cuthbert details the artistic history of West Virginia, from the small-town portraitists of the earliest settlements, through the flood of national and international landscapists who flocked to the state to depict the scenes of the American wilderness, to the important West Virginia figures in the modernist movements of the early twentieth century. Cuthbert searched art books for mention of West Virginia, combed through old newspapers and city directories and census records for listings of artists, and scoured the holdings of museums around the world. In an eminently readable style, Cuthbert details the early artistic life of the state and sets it within the framework of national and international developments in painting. The history of art and artists in West Virginia is brought to life here with over two hundred beautifully printed color plates from the collections of leading institutions such as the National Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, the National Gallery, Colonial Williams-burg, the U.S. Capital Collection, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and many others. Illustrations include the work of David Gilmour Blythe, Sara Gravatt, George Hetzel, Albert F. King, William Robinson Leigh, Andrew Melrose, Samantha Jane Atkeson Morgan, John Joseph Owens, David Hunter Strother, Alexander H. Wyant, and William Sheridan Young, to name only a handful. Also represented are Monongalia County native Emma Eva Hubbard, who founded the art department at West Virginia University in 1897, and her illustrious pupil, modernist painter and fellow Monongalia County native Blanche Lazzell. A biographical directory in the back of the booklists nearly one thousand painters who worked in the Mountain State before 1930. U.S. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, a patron of West Virginia art, wrote a foreword to the book, as well as lent paintings from his private collection.