The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, has on view through November 28, 2010, eight superb American paintings from the collection of a Dartmouth parent. Installed alongside highlights from the museum’s American art collections, these loans illuminate dramatic artistic and cultural changes that took place in America between the mid-1830s through World War I, tracing, for example, evolving attitudes toward nature, nation, and the growth of the city. Such rich cultural associations make these works ideal for interdisciplinary study by the Dartmouth community and the museum’s broader audiences.
Hudson River School Landscapes
Although the Hood boasts impressive holdings of portraits honoring Dartmouth luminaries and landscapes depicting New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the museum has no major works by the most prominent painters associated with the Hudson River School. Four of the loans are celebrated paintings by Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872), Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880), and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)—artists who span the chronological and stylistic range of this romantic landscape tradition.1
