Displaying items by tag: Hudson River School

Paintings by the Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey reside in the White House, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and museums at Yale and Princeton, but the best place to commune with Cropsey’s glorious 19th-century landscapes is in an oasis in Hastings-on-Hudson.

Not far from the rush of Metro-North trains on the Hudson Line, behind a commuter parking lot, is the Gallery of Art, which houses roughly 75 paintings spanning the career of an artist who idolized Thomas Cole and taught himself to paint well enough to join the likes of John Frederick Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church in the Hudson River School’s top tier.

Currently on exhibit at the Fruitlands Art Gallery is “Hidden Hudson,” a display of 35 of the 100 or so Hudson River School landscape paintings in the museum’s permanent collection. The adjective “hidden” describes the fact that these particular oil paintings have not been shown to the public for many years, and their creators are lesser known or actually unknown artists.

Another $150,000 in federal funding has been procured for a New York historic site where previously unknown wall paintings by a famous 19th-century artist have been uncovered.

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer announced this week that the Institute of Museum and Library Services has approved the additional grant for the home of Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole.

With the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill and Frederic Church’s home Olana, a New York state Parks Historic Site, in Greenport, it’s fair to say that Greene and Columbia counties form the heartland of the Hudson River School of Painting.

As such, movement in the art world that pertains to their works is always of interest to many in the area, and there has, in fact, been movement.

For its 2015 exhibition season, Boscobel House and Gardens will host Every Kind of a Painter: Thomas Prichard Rossiter (1818-1871) -- the first retrospective of the work of an important American artist long overdue for reappraisal.

Rossiter was a peer and friend to many better-known Hudson River School contemporaries such as John Frederick Kensett, Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand. Rather than limit himself to landscapes, Rossiter painted a diverse range of subjects. Approximately 25 paintings and works on paper from public and private collections will demonstrate the deftness with which he approached portraits, still lifes, landscapes, genre scenes and history paintings.

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents "Telling Tales: Stories and Legends in 19th-Century American Art" through June 7, 2015, in the Center’s Upper-Level Galleries. The exhibition features paintings and sculptures that recount stories relating to American cultural aspirations and everyday life throughout the 19th century. Narrative landscapes by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand of the Hudson River School, genre scenes by William Sidney Mount and Francis W. Edmonds and sculptures by John Rogers are among the highlights of the exhibition.

Assembled from the collection of the New-York Historical Society, Telling Tales integrates genre, historical, literary and religious subjects—through styles ranging from Neoclassicism to Realism—to paint a vivid portrait of American art and life during the country’s most formative century. The exhibition is organized into six sections: “American History Painting,” “English Literature and History,” “Importing the Grand Manner,” “Genre Paintings,” “Economic, Social, and Religious Division” and “Picturing the Outsider.”

The first significant new museum of American art in nearly half a century debuted in 2011. But to view Crystal Bridges' collection—from a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington to Jackson Pollock canvases—you don't travel to New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. You head down a forested ravine in a town in northwestern Arkansas.

As museum founder and Walmart heiress Alice Walton scooped up tens of millions of dollars' worth of art from across the country, thinly veiled snobbish rhetoric began to trickle out from the coasts. Most notably, when she purchased Asher B. Durand's 1849 "Kindred Spirits" from the New York Public Library for $35 million, some culturati bristled at the thought that this famed Hudson River School landscape would be leaving for Bentonville. The controversy raised the question: Who deserves access to great art?

On Monday, the Nelson-Atkins Museum announced that its wonderful Grand Canyon painting by Thomas Moran, from 1912, would grace a Forever stamp as part of an homage to the Hudson River School of artists — it’s one of four tributes.

What are the other three paintings? (I got no other press notices.) Were the other three museums, as the Post Office would choose only from works held in the public domain, mum on the honor? Guess so. But I looked it up.

High atop a hill, about two hours north of Manhattan, stands one of the most celebrated landmarks of the Hudson Valley region: Olana, the opulent Orientalist palazzo of Hudson River School landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). Church chose the spot for his home because of its commanding views of the beautiful river and its Catskill Mountain surroundings, views that he painted in all seasons. Moreover, a much smaller house directly across the majestic waterway was especially close to his heart: Cedar Grove, the home of Church's teacher Thomas Cole (1801-48). Cole is acknowledged as the founder of the Hudson River School, his Romantic compositions inaugurating the first body of distinctively American landscape paintings.

Now Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, is showing "Master, Mentor, Master: Thomas Cole & Frederic Church," an exhibition central to the story of Church's artistic development.