Displaying items by tag: Landscape Painting

The Peabody Essex Museum is presenting the largest U.S. exhibition of Joseph Mallord William Turner's maritime paintings.

"Turner & the Sea" features more than 100 works spanning the 50-year career of one of Britain's most celebrated painters. Encompassing oils, watercolors, prints and sketches from the 1790s to the mid-1800s, this first full-scale examination of Turner's lifelong attraction to the sea follows the artist's evolution from precocious young painter to one of the most important, controversial and prolific masters of his art. Dramatic and roiling, sunlit and cloudstruck, the power of Turner's glorious canvases changed the maritime aesthetic and influenced countless painters hundreds of years after his time.

The collection of American art at the Shelburne Museum tells the story of a new country finding its way through the 1700s and the 1880s. The 540 paintings help illustrate the history of a nation growing through westward expansion. The artwork, with its images of country stores and horse-drawn carriages, also begins to explain the Shelburne Museum itself, which was founded by Electra Havemeyer Webb in 1947.

"(The paintings) were kind of animating the museum for visitors," according to the museum's director, Tom Denenberg. "Without a doubt, the museum is already fixed in her head when she's buying these (paintings) in the late 1950s."

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.

Looking at the View, a sweeping display of 300 years of British landscape painting, opened at London’s Tate Britain on February 12, 2013. The exhibition coincides with the re-opening of the Tate Britain galleries, which were closed for renovations.

The show is part of the museum’s BP British Art Displays, a series that highlights contemporary and historic British art from its collection. Curated by Tate Britain’s director Penelope Curtis, Looking at the View illustrates the different ways British artists have interpreted and portrayed their surroundings over the past three centuries. The exhibition features works from the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite periods as well as paintings from the Land Art and other contemporary movements. Artists on view include J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), John Brett (1831-1902), Henry Lamb (1883-1960), Lucian Freud (1922-2011), and Tracey Emin (b. 1963).

Looking at the View, which presents over 70 works by more than 50 artists, is arranged according to motif and draws connections between artists from vastly different time periods and movements. It is on view at Tate Britain through June 2, 2013.

Days after the British government placed an export ban on two important works by the English painter, George Stubbs (1724-1806), officials have announced that they will take similar measures to keep a landscape painting of a London park by American Hudson River School artist, Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900), in the U.K.

The export ban placed on Cropsey’s Richmond Hill in the Summer of 1862 gives the British government time to raise money to keep the painting in the country rather than having it sold to a foreign buyer. The government will need to come up with about $7.83 million in order to keep the painting, which has been in British collections for 150 years, in the U.K. Richmond Hill is important to British culture because it draws connections between American and British landscape paintings of the 19^th century. It is one of the only British landscapes by an American artist to remain in the U.K.

The export ban will keep the Cropsey painting in the U.K. until April 7, 2013 and may be extended to August 7, 2013 if a potential British buyer has been found. The British government placed a previous export ban on Richmond Hill in 2000.  

The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. is currently hosting a number of events commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the arrival of the Emancipation Proclamation (1963) during the Civil War (1861-1865). The exhibition, The Civil War and American Art, focuses on how the devastation, emotions, and revolution associated with the war affected what appeared on the canvas for many artists working at the time.

Now on view at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, The Civil War and American Art relies on Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), Frederic Church (1826-1900), and Sanford Gifford (1823-1880) to ground the show. Through 75 works including paintings and vintage photographs, the exhibition creates a linear model, which mirrors the progression of the Civil War as a sense of unease on the eve of war transitioned to hope that the conflict would be resolved speedily to the harsh realization that there were too many wrongs to be righted quickly. Genre and landscape painters best captured the transformative effect of the Civil War as amber waves of grain were reduced to trampled crops, burned-down trees, and blood-soaked fields littered with bodies. There was also much to grapple with as the war ended and the country was left to restore itself and its identity.

The photography component of the exhibition includes snapshots taken on the battlefield by Alexander Gardner (1821-1882), Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840-1882), and George Barnard (1819-1902). These photographs, which document the Civil War’s carnage and destruction, shed light on the very real devastation that was suffered by many.

The Civil War and American Art will be on view at the Smithsonian through April 28, 2013 and will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (May 21-September 2, 2013) in New York after its run in Washington.

For the second time in two years, Paris' musee du Louvre, Atlanta's High Museum of Art, Bentonville, Arkanas' Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Chicago's Terra Foundation will join forces to promote American art history education. The collaboration, which launched last year, was conceived in 2007 after the High's exhibition Louvre Atlanta, the product of a collection-sharing agreement with the French institution.

This installation of the four-year collaboration will focus on American genre painting of the 19th century, specifically how artists associated with the movement depicted day-to-day life at a time when America was still coming into its own. The exhibition, titled American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life, will open at the Louvre on January 17, 2013 and travel to the Crystal Bridges Museum in May and then to the High Museum in September. Featured paintings include Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate's The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix (1856) from Crystal Bridges, Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South (circa 1870) from the High Museum, and George Caleb Bingham's The Jolly Flatboatmen (1877-78) from the Terra Foundation. The Louvre's contributions, a painting by the Dutch artist Jan Steen and one by Englishman William Mulready, will explore the European influence on American genre painting.

Last year's inaugural exhibition focused on American landscape painting and featured works by Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole. It is currently wrapping up its run at the High Museum ending January 6, 2013.

The Musée du Louvre, the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), and the Terra Foundation for American Art have announced the launch of a four-year collaboration devoted to American art. The first presentation of the “New Frontier” partnership is centered on Thomas Cole (1801–1848) and the rise of American landscape painting.
 
In 1975 the Louvre acquired The Cross in the Wilderness, the Louvre’s only painting by Thomas Cole, which represents the culmination of the artist’s reflection, initiated in 1825, on the representation of a certain type of American landscape, both untouched and grandiose. Inspired by the sentiments expressed in contemporary American literature by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, the works of Cole and those of his compatriot Asher B. Durand initiated a particularly new and fertile genre in the young school of American painting. In addition to the painting from the Louvre, five works drawn from the collections of the partner institutions have been selected for the inaugural presentation. These include the Landscape with Figures: A Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” (Terra Foundation for American Art) painted by Cole in 1826 and considered one of the artist’s first masterpieces.

Organized by:
Guillaume Faroult, curator in the Department of Paintings, Musée du Louvre