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 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. On view July 30th through November 6th.