Pythia

SMU's terminal MA has a great track record of graduates going on to fellowships/jobs at major institutions (the Getty, the National Gallery, the Dallas Museum of Art) and PhD programs at Harvard, Michigan, UCLA, USC, and UT-Austin, etc. And considering how small class years are, this is actually an incredibly high percentage, probably higher than you would see at some of the so-called "prestigious" programs.
SMU's MA program almost always provides full tuition with a stipend all four semesters for admitted students. There is a considerable amount of funding so that MA students can travel for their thesis research, and ample opportunities to get funding to attend conferences, etc. If you are looking to go on to the PhD, it will make a difference for admissions committees to see that other institutions have invested in you, rather than you just having paid for your degree.
Many of the name-brand terminal MA programs often do not have this level of funding for MAs. Its funny, there are some programs out there that have a reputation for prestige, but when you actually look at those institutions, none of the MA students are funded and they are paying $15k per semester for classes that are lectures (yes, 100-person lectures at the graduate level), with a corresponding amount of rigor (i.e., not really training you to be successful at the doctoral level), and few opportunities to work closely with faculty.
The SMU program IS small, but that means every class is a seminar designed such that students get tons of one-on-one mentoring, and by the end have produced a work of significant original research which can then be translated into a conference presentation or publication (and this kind of experience can be very helpful in preparation for higher levels of academia.)

Are you limiting yourself to terminal MA programs? If, so I think there are fewer options, which is why you might have had trouble finding people. Of the schools you mention, the Americanist from Illinois just decamped for USC (and who could blame her). UC Riverside has Jason Weems who works in 1930s-40s but could probably advise on an earlier topic. Americanists tend to be less specialized than other fields. Susan Rather is at Texas and Williams has Mike Lewis plus curators and fellows at the Clark and the college museum who teach American topics.
For PhD programs you have a lot more choice including Jennifer Roberts and Robin Kelsey at Harvard, Jenny Raab at Yale, Michael Leja and Gwen Dubois-Shaw at Penn, Rachel DeLue at Princeton, Wendy Bellion and Camara Holloway at Delaware, Melody Duesner at Indiana, Ross Barratt at BU, Alex Nemerov at Stanford, Bruce Robertson at UCSB, Angela Miller at WashU, Jenny Greenhill at USC, Maggie Cao at UNC, Kathy Manthorne at CUNY, Margaretta Lovell at UC Berkeley, and Maurie McInnis at UVA. These are just people I can think of off the top of  my head who work or have worked in 18th/19th century. I'm not sure how many are taking students. Of these, Roberts, Raab, Duesner, Greenhill, Holloway, Barratt, DuBois-Shaw and Cao are young or young-ish and the rest are more senior. 
Best of luck!

I totally second brown eyed girl. CUNY has some top notch scholars in 20th century. I also would look into departmental methodologies. Some departments are quite intense with their practice of social art history while others are quite indebted to psychoanalysis. Sorry to bring up a cliche, though many of these rankings promote comparing apples to oranges. Each scholar and each department have different things to offer. I would urge you to pick a position that puts you in a decent funding position and a helpful advisor.

Even more extreme: whether or not you think you will get in should have no bearing whatsoever on your selection of schools.

Actually, admission statistics indicate that Harvard is not much harder to get into than many other top 50 programs. I don't remember the exact figure off the top of my head, but recent acceptance percentages were around 6%...higher than places like Vanderbilt etc. I mean, any graduate program is technically a long shot, but there are no programs not worth applying to because of their perceived exclusivity. So long as your research interests seem to fit, it's worth applying.

One thing to keep in mind is that these "tiers" COMPLETELY depend on what field you're in. For my field, Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, Penn, and NYU are all definitely 2nd Tier schools.
I would definitely not consider all the Ivies to be "top tier." This is not college, so having an Ivy League name does not guarantee anything. As you said, Cornell in particular does not have a great reputation.
Finally, consider how happy you would be at these places. Columbia & NYU have the reputation for being very competitive and having unavailable professors. I almost went to Columbia, but decided I would be very unhappy there. Think about where you would do your best work, because ultimately what matters is not whether your school was ranked #5 or #7, but how good your scholarship is, how much your advisor can do to help you while you study under him/her, and how much s/he can help you make connections and find a job.

They were one of the surprises in the latest NRC rankings, coming in the top tier in a few categories. My advice is always to choose schools based on professors whose scholarship most interests you, and then secondarily how those professors' students have fared in the academic and museum markets over the years. The only prof. I know anything about at Temple is Alan Braddock, who is doing interesting "eco-critical" work in American art, but is relatively young.
I think it's wise to look at schools like Temple, which are outside the range of the 7-9 graduate programs everyone on gradcafe seems to be applying to (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, IFA, Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Hopkins). I feel bad for all of these gradcafers interested in modern European art competing with each other for a very slim number of slots because they think if they don't go to the schools mentioned above they are destined to work at Barnes & Noble the rest of their lives. Other programs I might put in the "overlooked" category that have successful students in a variety of fields are CUNY, Rutgers, UNC, UCSB, UCLA, Delaware, WUSTL Maryland, Duke, Emory, Indiana, UT, and Michigan. Always remember that one of the historically poorly ranked PhD programs in art history is an Ivy, Cornell, so it's not always about the "name". This is of course an anecdotal list.

It depends a lot on the school. It seems to me that you have a better chance of getting funded at a MA that is not attached to a PhD, such as Williams or Tulane, but even they don't fund all of their students. Just beware of schools that use their MA students to essentially pay for their PhD students.

^^ Amen. It's exceedingly difficult to write that stellar dissertation if you are working extra jobs to make ends meet, if you cannot afford to travel to pursue or present your research, if your advisor has not published enough him/herself to give you sound advice about how to frame your work for a wider audience, and if you are not surrounded by a cohort of excellent, challenging young scholars to push you in creative ways. People can and do, of course, turn out great work in smaller/less famous environments, and sometimes (too often) people in the top-tier programs wind up feeling crippled by the pressure and dropping out. It's all really a matter of fit, and individual preferences. But in general there certainly is a strong correlation between institutional resources and quality/success of dissertations. 

I've said this before on this forum, but the MOST IMPORTANT thing when it comes to getting a tenure-track job is the quality of your dissertation and the research profile that you have crafted for yourself.  I was recently on a search committee and we conducted interviews at CAA.  We interviewed candidates from Ivies whose research was not nearly as compelling/ground-breaking as candidates who came from institutions that would probably be considered "second tier."  So I contend that it simply does not matter all that much.  Write a dissertation that will be interesting to people inside AND outside of your field.  When we were going through the pile of applications for our tt job, we honestly did not care one bit where each candidate received their PhD.  FYI.  I work at a respected liberal arts college with an R1 profile. 

People who smoke in front of entryways and bus stops. Look, I don't care about your health. I really don't. I do unhealthy things too, so you can smoke away. But my unhealthy habits don't make people walk through clouds of crappy smelling smoke, making them cough and their eyes water when it's particularly heavy, just to get to class, or just when waiting for the bus. You're not meant to smoke within 25 feet of entrances or at bus stops anyway. :\

Tulane is fully funded.  UT Austin occasionally funds their top candidates if they want them to stay on for the PhD (so perhaps this isn't what you're looking for?).  Its generally easier to get accepted to an MA than a PhD program, but my guess would be that funding is just as competitive, no matter the level.  Sadly, business schools produce more wealthy donor alums than do art history departments.  For all of our benefit, I'm keeping fingers crossed that the folks at the Gates Foundation are secretly art history fanatics!