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Two new books on antebellum American painting are indicative of the increased interest in interdisciplinary research by art historians. A greater variety of concerns and questions now drives research in art history, and it is linked to an increased professionalization of the discipline. The number of historians has grown, as has their scholarly output. That is certainly true for American art, and today the quantity, quality and diversity of publications in that field make staying abreast of the literature a truly Sisyphean task. Within the recent literature on American art one finds material which can speak to both specialists and generalists, even when closely argued. The two books under review fulfill these characteristics. That is not to say, however, that their arguments are completely persuasive, at least to this reader. But more on that later. Each author has written on an aspect of antebellum American painting: Boime on landscape, and Albert Johns on genre. Boime makes clear that he intends to reach past the established American scholarship that "grounded the