In appreciation for a group of paintings that the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is lending next year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is reciprocating with paintings from the Hudson River School. The Hudson River School is one of the foundational and most influential traditions in the history of American landscape painting. Word of the upcoming display inspired a group of Philadelphia-area collectors to share with the academy highlights from their own superlative collections of Hudson River School art.
This exhibition, titled “Public Treasures/Private Visions: Hudson River School Masterworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art & Private Collections,” will be in the PAFA Historic Landmark Building, 118 North Broad Street, June 15 through September 30.
“This is a rare opportunity to see paintings that seldom travel outside of New York City, as well as paintings that ordinarily remain behind closed doors,” says Anna Marley, PAFA’s curator of historical American art.
Ranging from grand visions of the American West to quiet forest interiors, American painters absorbed the traditions of European landscape artists and then reinvented them to celebrate the distinctiveness of the vast American landscape. For many of the Hudson River School artists, who had spent years studying and painting in Europe, they sought to create new art for a new land, generating new styles, themes and methods for American painting.
Their often-dramatic vistas on large-scale canvases became the signature vision that many American’s had of places like Yosemite, the Adirondacks and the American West. These images not only promoted curiosity, but even had a strong impact on westward expansion of the railroads and tourism, as citizens sought to see these majestic sites in person.
The exhibition features works by ten noted Hudson River School artists. The Metropolitan loan includes works by Thomas Cole, Asher Durand and Albert Bierstadt.
Complementing works by these artists will be diverse visions from Frederic Church, a brilliant autumn scene by Jasper Francis Cropsey, luminous treatments of summer afternoons by William Stanley Haseltine and John Frederick Kensett, an example of Martin Johnson Heade’s quiet vision of twilight, a golden Sanford R. Gifford painting of Mount Mansfield and one of Thomas Moran’s breathtaking views of Yellowstone National Park.
Interspersed throughout “Public Treasures/Private Visions” will be works from PAFA’s own collection of mid-Nineteenth Century landscape paintings, highlighting artists such as Heade, Moran and Cropsey’s journeys abroad.
Admission to PAFA’s Morris Gallery exhibitions is free with entrance admission. For more information, 215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org .
