The chart is an interactive lineage map. American Scene Painting sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.

For American Scene Painting (1920s – 1940s), it traces one movement that shaped it, a well-established link: American realism; it runs alongside three parallel movements, a mix of well-established and looser, indirect links: the Ashcan School, the Harlem Renaissance and Precisionism; it fans out to one movement it went on to influence, a well-established link: Regionalism.