Featuring essays by Paul Manoguerra, curator of American Art at the Georgia Museum of Art, and Janice Simon, professor of art history at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, Classic Ground: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Painting and the Italian Encounter accompanies the exhibition of the same title. The exhibition brings together a group of paintings by American artists as a result of their mid-nineteenth-century Italian travels on the "Grand Tour." Thomas Cole, Martin Johnson Heade, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and other American painters created a body of work featuring Italian landscapes, people, buildings, and life. Classic Ground situates American paintings, with Italian subject matter, in the context of mid-nineteenth-century politics, gender, ideology, religion, and popular culture.