The Eastern American and European Gallery is designed to convey collecting taste in the Panhandle-Plains region and tells the viewer what types of Eastern American and European art have interested Panhandle residents since the 1890s. Typically, most of these objects were obtained after the donors settled in the area, although some were family heirlooms. Pieces in the gallery range from the 16th to 19th centuries and give a good cross-section of art from nearly all the European countries, including Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Germany, as well as the eastern United States. The museum's largest holdings are with the 19th century British school and the 17th century Dutch school, with a few examples from the countries cited above.
Highlights in the European collection include a painting by Italian Renaissance painter Marco Bello; a painting of Venice by the Spanish Impressionist Martin Rico Ortega; landscapes by Thomas Creswick, a popular British painter of the Victorian period; a shipping scene of the 17th-century Dutch School; a portrait on copper by Eduard Stroehling, a German painter; a landscape by Barbizon-school painter Jules Dupré and a “cows in a landscape” by 19th century Dutch painter Johannes Hubertus Leonardus de Haas.
Prominent among the Eastern American school are paintings by Hudson River school painter Jasper Francis Cropsey; George Inness, proponent of the American Barbizon movement; Ralph Albert Blakelock, a Hudson River School artist turned visionary; Bruce Crane, an American Tonalist; Thomas Moran’s The City of Mexico (1894); and Dewitt McClellan Lockman, a New York society portrait painter who used Ash Can School effects in his genre paintings, such as the grand Partiality (1905).