PITTSBURGH Landscape paintings featured in exhibit
The 19th-century works show the grandeur of American wilderness.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- The panoramic views of rugged mountains, lush foliage and bright skies found in a movement of 19th-century American landscape paintings are said to reflect a young nation staring at a new frontier.
The works of Hudson River school artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Church often celebrate the beauty of the wilderness, but the movement also carried potent messages of change, such as the forced relocation of American Indians.
Carnegie Museum of Art is highlighting the grandeur of those paintings in an exhibit titled "America the Beautiful," which runs through May 9.
"The landscape was the greatest resource, which basically promised extraordinary success for this country," said Elizabeth Kornhauser, chief curator of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
Wadsworth officials decided to take their extensive Hudson River school collection on tour while renovating their museum in Hartford, Conn. Many of the paintings in the collection were commissioned by Daniel Wadsworth and Elisabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, widow of gun manufacturer Samuel Colt.
Contrast with photos
Curators at the Carnegie chose to contrast the vivid colors and grand scales employed by artists from the movement between 1825 and 1870 with landscape photographs that were starting to compete for attention.
After the visit to Pittsburgh, the collection of 55 paintings -- considered the finest of the movement -- will move on to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, N.C., Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla., The St. Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, and Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn.
"We wanted to get our collection to regions where there were not great Hudson holdings," Kornhauser said.
A theme found in many Hudson paintings is America conquering its wilderness and the settlement of the frontier, Kornhauser said.
A striking example is Albert Bierstadt's "Toward the Setting Sun," which depicts an American Indian and a child turned away from the viewer to watch the setting sun. It's a foreboding depiction of what would happen to the native population, Kornhauser said.
"These paintings were very much a product of their own time," she said. "The political aspirations of their new nation -- the [doctrine] of Manifest Destiny -- are in these paintings."