Opening Tonight at the New York Historical Society

Asher Brown Durand, White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch, NH; 1857, oil on canvas

from the Robert L. Stuart Collection, on permanent loan from The New York Public Library

Speaking of landscape painting...after completing a national tour, Nature and the American Vision returns and opens tonight at The New York Historical Society. On view through February 21, 2013 are forty-five iconic works from The Hudson River School including Thomas Cole's five part series, The Course of Empire. 

The exhibition will also feature works that didn't tour including: 

• newly conserved Studies from Nature by Durand as well as a number of important landscapes that have been recently treated.
• Pool in the Catskills, c. 1870, a rare landscape painting by Durand's only female student, Mary Josephine Walters
• Morning in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia, c. 1859, a large major work by William Sonntag that has not been displayed in decades;
• and two Italian landscapes by the African-American landscape painter, Robert S. Duncanson, on loan from Charlynn and Warren Goins. (see our post about Duncanson's current exhibition at The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University).

The exhibition is organized in four thematic sections: The American Grand Tour, American Artists A-Field, Dreams of Arcadia: Americans in Italy and Grand Lanscape Narratives. These works showcase American artists embodying powerful ideas about nature, culture and history in their paintings in locations both near and far.

The GCA Salon will likely visit this exhibition one of the Friday evenings that the museum is open late. Stay tuned for more information!