May 20, 2008 – winter 2010-11
Landscape painting in America reached its high point in the mid-19th century, peaking around the time of the Civil War. Nine important American landscape paintings, ranging in date from 1836 to about 1897, will be on view beginning May 20, 2008, in the Museum's Robert Lehman Wing, while The Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Paintings and Sculpture Galleries undergo renovation. The paintings will return to view in the American Wing when its galleries reopen in winter 2010-11.
The centerpiece of the installation in the Lehman Wing is a work by the noted American painter Thomas Cole, who is often called the father of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. His magnificent 1836 canvas, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, is stunning in its wealth of detail, from the wild promontory in the foreground to the pastoral Connecticut River Valley in the distance.
Other highlights of the installation are two masterpieces of American landscape painting: Frederic Edwin Church's Heart of the Andes, 1859, and Albert Bierstadt's Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863. These remarkable works – one, an uncannily detailed panorama of the Ecuadorian Andes, and the other, a grand depiction of the American
West – were shown to great acclaim at New York's 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair,
which was organized to raise funds for wounded Union soldiers. This event, in turn, galvanized interest in establishing a municipal art museum – the Metropolitan Museum, which was founded in 1870.
Several pictures in the installation were shown originally as single attractions – for which admission was charged – with theatrical framing, lighting, programs, and other accessories. The landscape painters adopted these exhibition techniques from panoramists (such as John Vanderlyn whose Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles, is permanently installed in a circular gallery that was specially built to house it in the American Wing) and historical artists of earlier generations.
Popular promotion of this kind also affected the taste of private collectors – captains of industry, the railroads, and finance – who created grand galleries in their homes to accommodate paintings that matched their own sense of enterprise. Jasper F. Cropsey's large and elaborate Valley of Wyoming, for example, was commissioned by Milton Courtright, the first president of the New York Elevated Railroad Company. A civil engineer by profession, Courtright was born and raised on his family's farm in Plains, between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Wyoming Valley.
Works on view:
Thomas Cole (1801-1848), View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836
Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), The Heart of the Andes, 1859
Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863
Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900), The Valley of Wyoming, 1865
George Inness (1824-1894), Peace and Plenty, 1865
William Bradford (1823-1892), An Arctic Summer: Boring Through the Pack in Melville Bay, 1871
George Inness (1825-1894), Pine Grove of the Barberini Villa, 1876
Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), The Aegean Sea, ca. 1877
William Lamb Picknell (1853-1897), Banks of the Loing, ca. 1894-97
# # #
May 19, 2008
Press resources