The Susquehanna is the 16th-longest river in the United States, and the longest on the Eastern seaboard. Painters, poets, politicians and pundits have long enlisted the largely unnavigable stream as an emblem of national identity, economic promise and ecological consciousness. "Visions of the Susquehanna: 250 Years by American Masters," a recent exhibition curated by Rob Evans for the Lancaster Museum of Art, is traveling to museums across Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York—the three states through which the Susquehanna flows—and provides an opportunity to re-think the river’s artistic richness and cultural history. have long enlisted the largely unnavigable stream as an emblem of national identity, economic promise and ecological consciousness. "Visions of the Susquehanna: 250 Years by American Masters," a recent exhibition curated by Rob Evans for the Lancaster Museum of Art, is traveling to museums across Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York—the three states through which the Susquehanna flows—and provides an opportunity to re-think the river’s artistic richness and cultural history.

From Benjamin West’s "A View on the Susquehanna" (1767) through Thomas Moran’s "View on the Susquehanna" (circa 1863), Evans’s project demonstrates that the river has given American artists an alternately romantic, mysterious and optimistic visual metaphor. The exhibition also demonstrates the impact of the river and its visual traditions in the work of selected contemporary artists, including Debra Bermingham, Randall Exon, Mark Innerst, Michael Allen, Mark Workman and Evans, who is also an artist. (The exhibition can be seen at York College Art Gallery in York, Pa. through Feb. 20 and then at the Roberson Museum and Science Center in Binghamton, N.Y., May 15–Aug. 30.)

Jasper Francis Cropsey was one of several mid-19th-century American painters who envisioned the Susquehanna as a meeting of nature and culture. His "Starrucca Viaduct" (1865) depicts the structure at Lanesboro, Pennsylvania, with the light-blue sky and curving land formations at right crowning the foreshortened river in the middle ground. Built in 1847–48 at a cost of almost $340,000, the viaduct measures 1,040 feet long by 25 feet wide and is 100 feet high. Henry David Thoreau compared it to "a colossal piece of statuary in a green park." Cropsey’s painting, however, offsets the human presence by way of the large scale of land, sky and especially river, which here is an apt metaphor for reflection and contemplation. Cropsey painted the Starrucca Valley as early as 1853, and would continue to poeticize the Susquehanna River well into the later 19th century.

While it may well be the best-known painting of the Susquehanna, Cropsey’s view of the Starrucca Viaduct was not unprecedented. Among those who also tried their hand at this unique meeting of nature and culture was the painter-printmaker Edwin Whitefield, who in 1853 sketched "The Starrucca Viaduct from the Southeast Side of the Susquehanna River." The train is still visible, along with the middle-ground buildings and parceled acreage, although the horizontal format and low horizon line afford the opportunity to foreshorten the expanse of water, yielding the illusion that the Susquehanna extends into the viewer’s space.

Whitefield and Cropsey’s pictures attest to cultural historian Roger Stein’s observation that the Susquehanna River offered artists not so much the grandiose drama of contemporary Hudson River School landscape painting but rather the "settled landscape." Cropsey also highlighted this aspect of the Susquehanna in "The Valley of Wyoming" (1865) where the majestic Claudean tree at right frames the expansive, light-soaked plain, and the sinuous river, at left, fits into the semi-developed landscape like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

A 1965 exhibition dubbed the artist, writer and photographer Lloyd Mifflin the "painter and poet of the Susquehanna." A native of Columbia, Pennsylvania, where towering bluffs dramatically frame the river, Mifflin consistently engaged the Susquehanna as subject matter. His later compositions, such as "Rocks of the Susquehanna: Low Water" (1891) and "The Susquehanna River from the Hills (Columbia, Pennsylvania)" (1913) enlist experimental devices and bold vantage points to heighten the river’s inherent romantic appeal. In the former, the worm’s-eye view transforms the stones and boulders into evocative elements in an abstract variant on natural history. In the latter, Mifflin alters the traditional landscape template with the ferocious rain clouds and gnarled, twisting trees at right, depicted in expressive, vibrant painterly tones.

Like many of his contemporaries, the artist was interested in the work of J.M.W. Turner. With richly scumbled light-soaked clouds and foreground water dissolving amid labyrinthine reflections, "The Susquehanna River from the Hills (Columbia, Pennsylvania)" (1913) pays homage to the British landscape painter. In both works, Mifflin shows the river in unspoiled glory, unmarked by rampant industry.