Dates:
June 15, 2009 - May 30, 2010
Location:
Gallery 10, Historic Landmark Building
Public Program:
Saturday, April 11th, 1 pm
Is Seeing Ever Really Believing?: A Conversation About the Landscape with curators Anna Marley and Julien Robson
Description:
In appreciation for a group of paintings that PAFA is lending next year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is reciprocating with paintings from the Hudson River School. Public Treasures/Private Visions is a rare opportunity to see paintings that seldom travel outside of New York City, as well as paintings from superlative select private collections of Hudson River School art.
The Hudson River School is one of the most influential traditions in the history of American landscape painting. Ranging from grand visions of the American West to quiet forest interiors, American painters absorbed the traditions of European landscape artists and reinvented them to celebrate the distinctiveness of the vast American landscape and created new art for a new land.
The often-dramatic vistas on large-scale canvasses became the signature vision that many American's had of places like Yosemite, the Adirondacks and the American West. As such, the images promoted curiosity and even impacted westward expansion of the railroads and tourism.
The exhibition includes works by ten noted Hudson River School artists. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's loans include: Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm-The Oxbow, 1836; Albert Bierstadt, Merced River, Yosemite Valley, 1866; Asher Brown Durand, The Beeches, 1845. Other works include diverse visions such as Frederic Edwin Church's South American scene of Cotopaxi, luminous treatments of summer afternoons by William Stanley Haseltine and John Frederick Kensett, a brilliant autumn scene by Jasper Francis Cropsey, a quiet twilight scene by Martin Johnson Heade, as well as a Sanford R. Gifford painting of Mount Mansfield and a Thomas Moran painting of Yellowstone National Park.
Interspersed throughout the exhibition will be works from PAFA's own collection of mid-nineteenth century landscape paintings highlighting journeys abroad by Heade, Moran and Cropsey.
Curator:
Anna Marley, Curator of Historical American Art
Sponsors:
Newington-Cropsey Foundation
Click here to read the interview with curator Anna Marley on the Hudson River School or click below to listen to the interview.