Art historical scholarship related to nineteenth-century American art traditionally engages with artistic activities conducted in the Northeast, while largely neglecting contemporaneous enterprises that occurred in the American South. The intention of this dissertation, broadly considered, is to spark a reassessment of the Souths place in American art history by examining the significant changes affected by one southern artist in particular, Charles Fraser (1782-1860). More specifically, I argue that Fraser, who is most often discussed as a miniaturist, is still more significant to American art as a landscape painter and promoter of the fine arts during the antebellum era. Indeed, the artist avidly pursued landscape painting before the genre had a significant market in the United States and prior to its emergence as a signifier of Americas natural exceptionalism and cultural identity. He was not the only southern artist working during the first half of the nineteenth century, but, as this dissertation demonstrates, Fraser was extraordinarily persistent in his pursuit of artistic training, his promotion of the fine arts in Charleston, and his determination to maintain a diplomatic stance in the midst of escalating tensions between North and South.