Displaying items by tag: 19th century

The prestigious Winter Antiques Show, which is in its 60^th year, will present a loan exhibition honoring the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Fresh Take, Making Connections to the Peabody Essex Museum will present over 50 paintings, sculptures, textiles and decorative objects from the Peabody Essex, one of the country’s oldest and most progressive museums. The exhibition will be on view during the entire run of the Winter Antiques Show, which will take place from January 24, 2014 to February 2, 2014 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City.

Highlights from Fresh Take, Making Connections to the Peabody Essex Museum include an 18^th century inlaid ivory chair from India, a mahogany dressing chest by Thomas Seymour (circa 1810) and a 19^th century portrait of the author Nathaniel Hawthorne by Charles Osgood. Jeff Daly, formerly a senior design advisor to the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will design the exhibition.  

Fresh Take will coincide with the Peabody Essex Museum’s 215^th anniversary. The institution recently embarked on a $650 million campaign and expansion that will place the museum among the top 10 art institutions in the country in terms of gallery space and total endowment.  

On Saturday, July 27, 2013 the Springfield Museum of Art in Springfield, MO will reunite two portraits that have been separated for 100 year. The paintings of Lewis Allen Dickens Crenshaw and his wife, Fanny Smith Crenshaw, are by the lauded 19^th century Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham.

Bingham, a pioneer of the Luminist style, painted the portraits late in his life. Mrs. Crenshaw’s portrait has been in the museum’s collection since 1990 after being donated by the couple’s late daughter. Mr. Crenshaw’s portrait remains in the family and is on loan to the museum through Rachael Cozad Fine Art, a Kansas City-based gallery.

The Crenshaws portraits will be hung side by side as part of a permanent “exhibition” highlighting the Springfield Museum’s collection. Other featured artists include Grant Wood, Charles Sheeler and Thomas Hart Benton.

The Cleveland Museum of Art acquired a rare enamel-on-copper copy of Titian’s (1485-1576) iconic 16^th century masterpiece Bacchus and Ariadne by the English enamel painter Henry Bone (1755-1834). The museum purchased the 19^th century work at Christie’s London on July 4, 2013 for $478,346. Curator John Seydl made the winning bid over the telephone from a London hotel in an effort to disguise the museum’s interest from other bidders.

The enamel measures 16 inches by 18 inches, which is exceptionally large for the medium typically used to execute portrait miniatures. The work includes an ornate gilt-wood and gesso frame and serves as a prime example of Bone’s innovative and widely admired enamel technique.

After being shipping to Cleveland, the Titian copy is expected to hang in the museum’s early 19^th century gallery, which features French and English art.  

The Hudson River School Art Trail will open for the season on June 22, 2013.The trail boasts guided hikes, which are organized by the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York and take visitors on a tour of the vistas, mountains and valleys that influenced the Hudson River School painters including Thomas Cole (1801-1848), Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900), and Sanford Gifford (1823-1880).

The Hudson River School Art Trail is divided into a number of large geographic areas and allows visitors to walk in the footsteps of some of the most significant artists of the 19^th century. The Hudson River School was the first major art movement to sweep America and it dominated the visual arts for over 50 years. The trail includes the home of Thomas Cole who is credited with founding the Hudson River School; Olana, the home of Frederic Edwin Church, an important figure in the movement; and views of the landscapes that are featured in the artists’ paintings.

The Hudson River School Art Trail was expanded last year, more than doubling its size from its original 8 sites in New York to 20 sites in New York, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

The Portland Museum of Art in Maine presents Shangaa: Art of Tanzania. The first major exhibition in the United States to focus on the traditional arts of Tanzania, Shangaa includes 165 objects on loan from private and public collections throughout the U.S. and Europe. While most of the works are sculptural in nature, styles range from expressionistic to abstract to refined.

“Shangaa” means “to amaze” in Swahili and that is the intent of the exhibition. Curated by Tanzanian art specialist Dr. Gary van Wyk, Shangaa includes works ranging in date from the 19^th century through today. The exhibition illustrates how Tanzanian culture uses art to channel energy, mark the passage into adulthood, and celebrate life among many other things.

Shangaa: Art of Tanzania will be on view through August 25, 2013.

49 paintings from the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, TN are now on view at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NE. Renoir to Chagall: Paris and the Allure of Color focuses on Paris’ emergence as the hub of the art world during the 19^th century and its role in shaping the Impressionist movement in France.

Between 1853 and 1870, under the command of Napoleon III, Paris was transformed from a quaint city to one of grandeur. Narrow streets and crowded houses were demolished in favor of striking boulevards, lush public gardens, and modern buildings. While the population and prosperity of the city soared, artists flocked to Paris to be inspired and thrive, ultimately defining the city’s modern era. Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Pierre Auguste Renoir (1885-1952), and Edgar Degas (1834-1917) all nurtured their artistic visions in Paris during this period. In 1874, the artists held an independent exhibition, which led to their classification by critics as Impressionists. The plein air technique and unblended painterly style of Impressionism eventually influenced future generations of avant-garde artists include Neo-Impressionists, Fauves and Cubists.

The museum’s founders, Hugo and Margaret Dixon, formed the institution’s magnificent collection of French paintings themselves. John Reward, a leading scholar of Impressionism, advised the couple. Renoir to Chagall offers the finest works from their holdings and is on view at the Joselyn Art Museum through September 1, 2013. Admission to the museum and exhibition is free.

After acquiring a considerable number of important drawings, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City has mounted an exhibition to showcase their recently added works. Spanning from the Renaissance through the 19^th century, the drawings were acquired through gifts, purchases, and bequests. Over 100 of these works will be featured in Old Masters, Newly Acquired.

The Morgan has greatly improved its Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Symbolist holdings by acquiring a number of works by such artists as Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), and Odilon Redon (1840-1916). The museum also acquired over forty Danish drawings including sheets by several Golden Age masters including C.W. Eckersberg (1783-1853) and Johan Lundbye (181-1848). The Morgan added to their British watercolor collection with works by John Martin (1789-1854) and Samuel Palmer (1805-1881). William M. Griswold, director of the museum, said, “The Morgan’s collection of drawings is among the finest in the world, and the institution has been very fortunate to have long-standing relationships with some of America’s most important collectors. This exhibition celebrates their connoisseurship and their commitment to the Morgan.”

Old Masters, New Acquired will be on view at the Morgan Library & Museum through August 11, 2013.

Fourteen watercolors by the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dali (1904-1989), will be sold at Bonham’s Impressionist and Modern Art auction in London on June 18, 2013. Commissioned by the publisher Jean-Paul Schneider in 1969, the watercolor fruit studies have been in private collections since their creation. The paintings are expected to garner a total of $1.5 million.

In the ‘FruitDali’ series, the painter takes traditional 19^th century botanical lithographs, which were originally used as scientific illustrations, and paints over them using his iconic surrealist twist. Dali infuses each fruit with humanistic qualities including legs, arms, and facial expressions. The works are a testament to Dali’s ability to find human forms in the ever-inspiring natural world.

William O’Reilly, Director of Bonhams Impressionist department, said, “These compositions are a fabulous illustration of Dali’s artistic approach. By overlaying such traditional images with his famous artistic vocabulary of dragons, hooded figures, crutches and weeping eyes, he gives us an insight into his own hyper-fertile imagination.”

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY is currently hosting the exhibition Albert Bierstadt in New York & New England. Guest curated by Anne Blaugrund, former director of National Academy Museum in New York, the exhibition features a wide selection of Albert Bierstadt’s (1830-1902) east coast paintings.

Bierstadt (1830-1902) a German-American painter best known for his lush landscapes of the American west, also spent time capturing the natural beauty of the White Mountains, the Hudson Valley, and New England in his work. All of the works on view were created between the late 1850s and 1880s and range from oil sketches to finished paintings. Albert Bierstadt in New York & New England is the 10^th annual presentation of 19^th century landscape paintings at the Thomas Cole site.

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site, which is also known as Cedar Grove, is comprised of the home and studios of Thomas Cole (1801-1848), the founder of the Hudson River School of painting. A National Historic Landmark, the site aims to communicate Cole’s profound influence on American art to a broader modern audience.

Albert Bierstadt in New York & New England is on view through November 3, 2013.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in Williamstown, MA received its largest gift to date from New York-based collectors Frank Martucci, and his wife, Katherine. The Martuccis donated an impressive collection of works including eight landscapes by the 19^th-century American painter George Inness (1825-1894).

The gift is extremely beneficial for the Clark, which focuses on collecting certain artists in depth; the museum currently boasts impressive collections of works by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Winslow Homer (1836-1910), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). The Martuccis’ donation strengthens the Clark’s Inness holdings as they had only two paintings by the artist in their collection, which were acquired in 1955. The Martuccis also donated oil paintings by Eastman Johnson (1824-1906) and Gaston Latouche (1854-1913), an early watercolor landscape by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), and five works by the Italian genre painter Mose Bianchi (1840-1904).

The new Inness landscapes will be featured in the exhibition George Inness: Gifts from Frank and Katherine Martucci from June 9 through September 8, 2013; the show will run concurrently with a major exhibition of paintings, watercolors, and prints by Winslow Homer.