Today the National Museum of American Art has the world's largest collection of works by this country's artists, from colonial limners to the contemporary avant-garde.

This book, with its vast array of full-color illustrations and accompanying text, invites readers to explore the remarkably wide range of the museum's holdings. Rather than simply presenting major works in the collection, the book is organized thematically to reflect the variety of concerns and aesthetic visions that have shaped American art over the past three centuries.

A section titled "People" thus provides an overview of portraiture in America, from the traditional eighteenth-century work of Charles Willson Peale to modern innovators such as Man Ray. "Early America" focuses on the efforts of artists to capture on canvas the broad vistas of the new country and its Native American inhabitants.

In these and the seven other sections of the book, the accompanying texts have been compiled from a wide spectrum of sources: exhibition catalogues, monographs, newspaper and magazine articles. The assortment of anecdotes, brief commentaries by critics and curators, and the artist's own words take the reader off the beaten path of art history while at the same time stimulating further study.