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By DAVID EVERITT

IF Mort Künstler felt compelled to paint his immediate surroundings, he might be tempted to re-create the vista outside his studio window, a glistening view of Center Island and the merging waters of Cold Spring Harbor and Long Island Sound. But his interests lie elsewhere. He absorbs himself, instead, in the props and reference works that crowd his third-story work space.

Arrayed here and there around his easel are a stack of 19th-century rifles, a Western-style saddle, an old-fashioned pistol holster and an assortment of photos and books. They all help steer him away from the setting here and provide the details for his vivid artistic excursions into America’s past.

Mr. Künstler, 74, has come to paint the history of America, he said, “purely by coincidence,” suggesting that it was a series of illustration assignments that just happened to land him in this field. But there has been nothing haphazard about his approach to this work, which has brought him acclaim.

“Some of his paintings just startle you in the amount of detail, the painstaking effort he makes at historical accuracy,” the historian Douglas Brinkley said in a telephone interview. “Yet he doesn’t lose the sense of grandeur of the moment.”

Franklin Hill Perrell, curator of the Nassau County Museum of Art, said, “There are a few good history painters around, but Mort, to me, is absolutely the pinnacle.”

The museum, in Roslyn Harbor, will showcase the artist’s work in an exhibition from Aug. 27 to Nov. 12, “The American Spirit: Paintings by Mort Künstler.” A show of Künstler’s Civil War paintings in 1998 was one of the most popular the museum has had, Mr. Perrell said.

The exhibition opening this month will depict, with more than 100 pictures, the full scope of America’s past, from Native American life and the Revolutionary War to the Vietnam era and the space age. Among the great events on canvas will be the fall of the Alamo, Custer’s Last Stand and the battle of Iwo Jima.

The Civil War — the subject most closely associated with Mr. Künstler — will be illustrated in scenes like the attack on Fort Sumter and the burning of Atlanta, while less tumultuous aspects of the country’s heritage will be represented by the quiet desperation of the Great Depression and pastoral views of American farm life.

The exhibition will provide an overview of the artist’s career chronicling the American experience, but it constitutes just a small part of his total output, which he says includes 3,000 to 4,000 paintings. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of American Illustration in New York City, the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Ga., and the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pa.

Mr. Künstler’s passion for art began developing when he was a young child living in Brooklyn in the 1930’s, he said.

His father encouraged him to pursue both athletics and art, and his prowess as a basketball player eventually got him into the Pratt Institute, where he studied illustration. He began establishing himself as a professional artist in the 1950’s by working for men’s adventure magazines, contributing to the most respectable titles in the genre like Argosy and True but more often to such lurid publications as For Men Only and Stag, where, as he put it, he became “king of the second-string magazines,” turning out “an average of six to eight pictures a week.”

The experience of creating so many complex, action-packed scenes was invaluable.

“Without that period of 10, 15 years of men’s adventure,” he said, “I could never have had the training to do what I’m doing today.”

His career headed in a new direction in the mid-1960’s when he began producing Western paperback covers and historical illustrations for National Geographic. Within a few years he was also rendering dynamic posters for films like “The Hindenburg” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”

The pivotal moment came in 1977 when the Hammer Galleries in Manhattan presented Mr. Künstler’s first one-man show. The success of the exhibition allowed him to rely less on publishing and advertising assignments, giving him more time, as he put it, to paint “bigger and better pictures.” Most of those pictures dealt with historical subjects.

Mr. Künstler began to explore the subject of the Civil War in 1982 when he painted a series of pictures to promote the television mini-series “The Blue and the Gray” and was commissioned to tackle other eras of American history by government agencies, museums and corporations, while doing his own work for various gallery shows.

Detail and accuracy are critical elements in his paintings. The historian Harold Holzer said that Mr. Künstler “researches his subjects the way a historian would.” He consults with experts in the field, visits the sites of the events and studies documents and photographs. Occasionally, he draws on sources near his Cove Neck home, like the 19th-century buildings and vehicles at Old Bethpage Village Restoration.

Whatever the historical subject, Mr. Künstler consistently cultivates a larger perspective. “One thing I know is, I always paint heroes,” he said. “I have a heroic viewpoint of whatever it is.”

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