The prosperity that followed the Revolution likewise supported a flowering of semitrained or folk portraiture in New England, headed by Ralph Earl. The leading artists who returned from England after the Revolution had been trained by Benjamin West in the neoclassical school of painting. Gilbert Stuart was the finest portraitist of the generation, his skillful brushwork capturing the likenesses of many chief figures of the Federal period, including Washington, immortalized in Stuart's so-called "Athenaeum" portrayal (1796, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). John Trumbull returned to become the nation's first history painter, recording the great moments of the Revolution in a series of paintings that include The Declaration of Independence (1794, Yale University Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut) and The Battle of Bunker's Hill (1789, Yale University Gallery), later versions (1817-24) of which may be seen in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C. An outstanding American romantic painter was Washington Allston, who returned from England in 1808 to produce landscapes and history paintings of great imaginative force.

Landscape painting culminated in the mature work of George Inness and  Albert Bierstadt . Drawing on the example of the French Barbizon school, Inness added to his American naturalism a taste for the moods of nature. Using increasingly rich color, he developed a poetic manner.

 
Until at least 1840 painting continued to be dominated by portraiture in the romantic manner. Thomas Sully created richly colored, strongly contrasted,
and idealized images in the English manner of the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence. Another leading romantic portraitist was Samuel F. B. Morse,
perhaps the most talented artist of his generation before he turned his full
attention to the development of telegraphy.
 

Among the most outstanding painters of the genre school that arose were William Sidney Mount, who recorded the daily lives of Long Island farmers in such paintings as Bargaining for a Horse (1835, New-York Historical Society, New York City), and George Caleb Bingham, who lived in the far west of the day and painted scenes from the lives of the fur traders and flatboatmen along the Mississippi River. Of the most influential schools was the  Hudson River School.