and its ideals. Duncanson was intrigued by landscape painting. As he moved away from portrait work, Duncanson became intrigued by travel prints, particularly the exploration journals of John Stevens and Frederick Catherwood, Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan. The prints in these books prompted Duncanson to experiment with depicting exotic places and forgotten civilizations in his work. Back in Cincinnati and full of new inspiration, he received a commission from Charles Avery, an abolitionist Methodist minister, in 1848. Not only did Cliff Mine, Lake Superior—the work Duncanson created for Avery—bolster his career as a landscape painter, it also established him within a network of abolitionist patrons who sustained most of his career. After completing Cliff Mine, Lake Superior (1848) for Charles Avery, Duncanson pursued landscape painting in earnest. Along with two other Cincinnati artists, T. Worthington Whittredge and William Louis Sonntag, Duncanson became inspired by the work of the Hudson River School artists and aspired to paint the American landscape. Together, the three artists set out on a series of sketching trips around the country to provide them with the necessary material and inspiration to bring back to their Cincinnati studios.(p. 28) After finishing the sketching tours, Duncanson focused on the Ohio River Valley in the early 1850s. With his ambitions cast on landscape work, operating on the style of the Hudson River School, Duncanson strived to transform his topographical works into romantic landscapes with literary allusions In order to accomplish this, he turned to Thomas Cole, copying many of his works dealing with paradise and drawing parallels between the imaginary lands painted and America. Around 1850, Duncanson was given his largest commission of his career by Nicholas Longworth to paint 8 landscape panels in Longworth's Cincinnati estate Belmont.The panels have been called the regarded as "among the most accomplished domestic mural paintings of pre-Civil War America." In 1851, Duncanson's created one more well-known landscape paintings from this time period, Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Miami River. In 1853, Duncanson embarked on the traditional "grand tour" of Europe, completed by many contemporary artists, which exposed him to the art world and provided inspiration for many of his future landscape works. In 1859, Duncanson finished his painting Landscape with Rainbow which, when exhibited, was "hailed as 'one of the most beautiful pictures painted on this side of the [Allegheny] mountains.’" This painting was prominently shown during Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20,