This summer I’m celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence with special articles covering American painters and their art. One of the strange facts of life in the UK and Europe is that remarkably few of their paintings are in our public collections, so I hope this will do a little to redress the balance and celebrate the rich cultural history of the USA.

This weekend’s pair of articles show a small selection of the eclectic paintings of an Italian-American who was one of William Merritt Chase’s most brilliant and successful pupils, and one of the fathers of modern American painting, Joseph Stella (1877–1946).

Born into a family of lawyers in southern Italy in 1877 as Giuseppe Michele Stella, his older brother emigrated to the USA to study medicine, and he followed suit in 1896. Like many migrants he stayed in New York City, but soon abandoned his medical training in favour of art. He started attending classes at the Art Students League in 1897, and enrolled in the New York School of Art the following year, where he was taught by William Merritt Chase. He attended Chase’s Shinnecock summer school in 1901, and one of his contemporaries was Marsden Hartley.

Stella proved talented, and a brilliant draftsman and illustrator, but grew unhappy in New York. In 1909 he returned to Italy, where he came into contact with Modernism, which was popular there at the time. After two years in Italy, in 1911 he moved to Paris, which was awash with Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism all in full swing. Then in the autumn/fall of 1912, he decided to give America a second try, and returned to New York City.

Stella was soon attracted to the dazzling electric lights of Luna Park (1913) on Coney Island, which had opened a decade earlier. The style he had brought from Paris was startlingly different from his earlier work, and Futurist.

That was followed by Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913), one of the earliest, and still among the greatest, of American Futurist paintings. Although it’s sometimes claimed that it was exhibited at the famous (even notorious) International Exhibition of Modern Art held in New York in early 1913 – known now as the Armory Show – Stella didn’t complete it until the autumn of that year, when it went on display in a private gallery in New York. His reputation among the avant-garde had been secured.

The following year, he painted Coney Island (1914).

Stella visited Europe and North Africa in the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War.

Later during the war, his motifs and style changed to concentrate on the smoky skies and factories of industrial America, for example in Telegraph Poles with Buildings from 1917.

Stella’s Bethlehem, painted in pastel in about 1918, shows the skyline and smoke of this city in Pennsylvania, from the mid-nineteenth century the centre of the US steel industry.

He also seems to have become involved in social campaigning at that time. Stella’s atmospheric charcoal drawing of Equal Work/Equal Pay from 1918 shows a woman and a man stenographer (typist, or possibly typesetters) working back-to-back in one of the dimly-lit clerical sweatshops.

Another pastel, Nocturne II from about 1919, is moving away from those smoky factories, but remains dark and quietly sinister.

That same year he painted this large almost Surrealist fantasy, Tree of My Life, which appears to have been influenced by the extraordinary paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s filled with exotic plants and birds, and passages are densely patterned, as shown in the detail below.

Stella’s eclecticism knew no bounds. After that, he painted probably his best-known work, this Cubist geometric analysis of Brooklyn Bridge (1919-20).

His most extraordinary accomplishment is surely the number of different styles he used over any given period. From his earlier industrial settings came the Precisionism of Factories in about 1920-21.

In 1920-22, Stella completed a huge five-panel mural for the Newark Museum, titled New York Interpreted (The Voice of the City). Critics considered it to be the most successful attempt to show city life during the period between the wars.

After yesterday’s visits to some of the city parks of London and Paris, today we resume our tour in the grounds of the Villa Borghese, in central Rome. This covers an area of just under 200 acres (80 hectares) that was originally landscaped in ‘English style’ from a former vineyard. It was bought by the city and made properly public in 1903, and has since hosted many events, including part of the 1960 Olympic Games.

In 1823, when public access to the park was still informal, the German painter Carl Eduard Ferdinand Blechen sketched this view In the Park of the Villa Borghese, showing one of its small fountains in an avenue of trees.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde painted this Summer Day in Villa Borghese in Rome late in his career, in 1922, after it had been made a public park and was being well used by groups of children.

The Leopoldstadt district of Vienna is famous for the Prater, a huge park of about 1,500 acres (600 hectares), a favourite of the Austrian painter Tina Blau.

During the early 1880s, she concentrated on painting in the Prater. This area of meadows and woods had been given to the public by Emperor Joseph II in 1766. In 1873 it was used for the Vienna World Fair, but hunting continued in the area until 1920. Spring Day in the Prater (c 1881-2) is one of her studio paintings from this period, with its detailed realist style. It shows the unusual combination of a flock of sheep and the promenade of the fashionably dressed.

In her undated Prater Gardens, its trees are just starting to change colour one autumn probably around 1890.

We end the weekend on the other shore of the North Atlantic, in New York, where we first visit Central Park in Manhattan. Designed by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, parts were first opened to the public in 1858, although it wasn’t fully completed until 1876. It now occupies a rectangular swathe of 843 acres (341 hectares) between Upper West Side and Upper East Side neighbourhoods.

William Merritt Chase’s View from Central Park shows the park in 1889, and relegates the large buildings of Manhattan to its distant skyline.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast’s view of carriages in Central Park, 1900 (1900) shows how crowded it could become in fine weather.

George Bellows painted Bethesda Fountain (Fountain in Central Park) in 1905, when still a student in New York. It shows, in rather sombre earth colours, this central feature of Bethesda Terrace in Central Park. This bronze statue was designed by Emma Stebbins, and in those days was still relatively new, having been unveiled in 1873. Its proper name is “The Angel of the Waters Fountain”, with the reference being made not to Bethesda, Maryland, but to the biblical location.

With Central Park under way, Olmsted and Vaux moved on to lay out what’s now an area of 526 acres (200 hectares) in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. This first opened in part in 1867, but wasn’t complete until 1873. In the late 1880s it was a favourite haunt and source of motifs for William Merritt Chase when he lived in Brooklyn.

Chase’s Terrace, Prospect Park from about 1886 captures the fresh colours of early summer in pastels.

The following year, his Park in Brooklyn shows housing at the park’s edge, beyond a section of informal garden.

Chase’s Boat House, Prospect Park (1887) shows the park’s original and fairly spartan wooden boathouse. In 1905-07 it was supplanted by a far grander building on the Lullwater of the lake, which is now better known.