Robert Seldon Duncanson was one of few African American landscape painters of the nineteenth century, and he achieved levels of success unknown to his contemporaries. By the 1860s, Duncanson was proclaimed to be the "greatest landscape painter in the West" by the American Press and London newspapers held him in equal regard to other British artists at the time. Richard Powell of "American Visions" says that Duncanson’s success is a “victory over society’s presumptions of what African-American artist should create.” Duncanson became nationally and internationally known for his landscape paintings modeled after the Hudson River School tradition, and is credited with developing the regional Ohio River Valley art form. Art historian Joseph D. Ketner claims that Duncanson's greatest contribution to art was "his distinctively picturesque-pastoral vision of landscape painting with allusions to popular romantic literature."