During the past twenty-five years, Jack Huber, Dartmouth Class of 1963, and his wife, Russell, have built a distinguished collection of American art dating from roughly 1885 to 1920, an era characterized by dramatic social, cultural, and artistic change. Embracing Elegance, an exhibition co-organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, features over thirty works from the collection, including pastels, drawings, watercolors, and paintings by such leading artists of the period as Cecilia Beaux, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Joseph DeCamp, Robert Henri, Lilla Cabot Perry, John Singer Sargent, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, Edmund Tarbell, John Henry Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir.
As a whole, the featured artists gravitated toward intimate, informal subjects, which they captured in a personally expressive manner influenced variously by the Aesthetic movement, impressionism, urban realism, and postimpressionism. Works by so-called Ashcan artists, including John Sloan and Everett Shinn, depict a mix of classes and races. Most of the works, however, reflect the more prevalent tendency to retreat from gritty, anxiety-provoking social issues. They celebrate instead beauty as found in timeless pastoral landscapes, poetic still lifes, and, especially, intimate images of beautiful women at ease. The latter trend can be seen in J. Alden Weir's emotive pastel of his wife, The Window Seat, 1889, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing's elegant White and Gold, circa 1894–1895. Introspective in mood and refined in taste, such works mirror more subtle shifts in cultural values, including a growing fascination with the life of the mind and an appreciation of art for art's sake, rather than for moralizing, didactic, or political purposes.
