H. L. Mencken wrote in 1917 that “when you come to . . . painters, sculptors, architects, and the like, you will have to give it up, for there is not a bad one between the Potomac mud-flats and the Gulf,” and he was generally assumed to be correct. Seventy-three years later William Gerdts explained in the second volume of his masterly Art Across America that “the art of the South has, until recently, been terra incognita. . . . Post-Civil War artistic activity has not only been ignored but even denied, presumed to have been a victim of the war’s devastation.