As Reynolda House Museum of American Art prepares to celebrate its fortieth anniversary in September 2007, a new exhibition will open in the historic house featuring six American masterpieces. The show, appropriately titled Forty Artful Years will remain on view through March 9, 2008.
This small, focused show includes paintings by Jasper Francis Cropsey, David Johnson, William Sydney Mount, Eastman Johnson, William Merritt Chase, and Thomas Eakins. This particular collection is representative of the vigor and diversity of the Museum's early program for collecting American Art.
With the careful guidance of Founding Director Barbara Millhouse, all of these works were purchased by the Museum or given as gifts between 1967 and 1974. Together, they represent the three dominant categories in nineteenth-century American art: landscape, genre painting, and portraiture.
Landscape paintings gave Americans the opportunity to formulate ideas about the unique land they inhabited – its vibrant fall foliage, its natural wonders. Genre paintings, or scenes of everyday life, often included moral lessons that nineteenth-century Americans considered valuable. And portraits allowed citizens of the young country to present themselves as cultivated and refined, significant as America began asserting its cultural and economic importance. -- www.reynoldahouse.org
Comment and add to the story without registration, but keep the comments meaningful please. Links are not accepted.
