Frank Wilbert Stokes (1858-1955) was an academically trained American artist living and working during the turn of the twentieth century. He studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and with Jean-Leon Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he subsequently stayed and exhibited for nearly ten years. However, he is perhaps best known for the work he did as an independent artist-member of two expeditions to Northern Greenland in 1892 and 1893-94 with famed explorer Robert Peary. Considering that scientific and political campaigns funded these expeditions to survey the Arctic regions and collect ethnographic material, Stokes’s artistic autonomy is significant. Indeed, while attending Peary’s expeditions, Stokes became one of the most prolific artists of the Arctic, producing images of the local Inuit as well as depictions of the vibrant landscape. This thesis serves as the first comprehensive art historical analysis of his Arctic production, which offers new perspectives on the field of expedition art. In addition to his numerous plein air landscape paintings, Stokes created distinctive portrait drawings of native Inuit and larger genre scenes. By investigating these works separately in designated chapters, it shows Stokes’s investment as an emerging artist in response to the dominant interests in landscape and portraiture at the end of the nineteenth century. While his colorful landscape paintings reflect and represent his spiritual connection to nature, his portrait studies emphasize his attention to individual character and detail. My thesis asserts that these subjects allowed Stokes to negotiate, either explicitly or implicitly, mainstream American society’s ambivalence towards modernity at the turn of the century. Furthermore, while much recent scholarship has explored intersections between nineteenth-century art and science, considering Stokes’s Arctic oeuvre in comparison to Peary’s accounts of Greenland illuminates the disparate demands placed on artist and scientist at this time. Stokes’s artistic independence allowed him to view the Inuit and their culture with a greater degree of respect than did Peary; yet, at the same time, he posited Greenland and its people as a space apart from the modern world. Therefore, in its entirety, Stokes’s Arctic oeuvre reveals his personal and professional commitment towards envisioning a “primitive” ideal in reaction to socio-political changes in America at the end of the nineteenth century.