"Episodes at the End of Landscape" explores the understudied decline of American landscape painting in the late nineteenth century through a set of limit cases. As a crucial follow-up to canonical publications on the mid-century growth of landscape into a symbolic, nationalist genre, this dissertation argues that landscape’s inability to sustain its earlier cultural function in the face of modernity compelled certain artists--namely Albert Bierstadt, Martin Johnson Heade, Ralph Blakelock, and Abbott Thayer--to challenge its deeply engrained representational models. Each chapter examines unorthodox artworks that pushed landscape to unsettling limits against aspects of the genre subjected to testing and revision: closure, ground, value, and figure. American landscape painting between 1870 and 1914 can best be understood in terms of failure, in so far as these artworks sought to mourn, revise or resuscitate the genre at its moment of crisis.