Art News

Forty-Five Magnificent Landscape Paintings on View at Peabody Essex Museum

SALEM, MA.- This summer, visitors to the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) will come inside to get closer to nature. Forty-five magnificent landscape paintings featuring rugged mountains, verdant forests and luminous sunsets are on display which started July 30, 2011 in Painting the American Vision, an exhibition of works by Hudson River School painters from the collection of the New-York Historical Society. In the first half of the 19th century, a loosely affiliated group of painters, poets and writers sought to create a distinctly American aesthetic, liberated from European history and artistic conventions. What they had in common was a belief in the transformative power of nature, its ability to change and be changed, and its potency as a source for individual spiritual renewal. The works they created also demonstrated an early awareness of the importance of preserving natural sites