Obscure in his own lifetime, Thomas Chambers found fame in the twentieth century with the discovery of The "Constitution" and the "Guerriere," a rare signed painting of his that unlocked the identity of the artist behind a singularly flamboyant group of mid-nineteenth-century American marine and landscape paintings. Chambers's expressive style and bold decorative sensibility appealed to avant-garde taste, and he was hailed as a spunky native original, "America's first modern." Although almost nothing was known about his life, his work rapidly earned a place in the growing collections and anthologies of American folk art.

As more of Chambers's work came to light, a spare life story was constructed from census records, city directories, and a handful of dated paintings that document a career in the United States between 1832 and 1865. Widely recognized but little studied in the last fifty years, the artist receives here the first survey of his work since his modern debut in New York in 1942.