Columbia, South Carolina.- The Columbia Museum of Art is proud to be hosting forty-five magnificent paintings from the rich collection of the New-York Historical Society, which will be on view in “Nature and the Grand American Vision: Masterpieces of the Hudson River School Painters” at the museum from November 19th through April 1st 2012. Though the New-York Historical Society seldom loans individual works, these iconic works of 19th-century landscape painting are traveling on a national tour for the first time and are circulating to four museums around the country as part of the Historical Society’s traveling exhibitions program ‘Sharing a National Treasure’. The Columbia Museum of Art is the first stop in the South.
During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a loose-knit group of artists and writers — who collectively became known as the “Hudson River School” — forged the first American landscape vision and literary voice. That vision, still widely influential today, saw the natural world as a source of spiritual renewal and an expression of an emerging national identity. It was first expressed through the majestic scenery of the Hudson River Valley. Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is the leading artist associated with the Hudson River School, and is widely credited as being its founder. An English émigré, Cole arrived with his family in Ohio in 1818, where he learned the elements of painting from an itinerant portrait painter. Earning few commissions for portraits, Cole gradually moved east. He settled in New York City in 1825, and shortly afterwards sailed up the Hudson River for the Catskill Mountains, making sketches along the banks of the Hudson. Cole produced a series of paintings which were spotted in a bookstore window by three influential artists, garnering him instant acclaim and widespread commissions. Cole’s style was marked by dramatic forms and vigorous technique, reflecting the British aesthetic theory of the Sublime, or fearsome, in nature. This technique, virtually unprecedented in American landscape, expressed a growing appreciation of the wild native scenery which was explored throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century.
“Nature and the Grand American Vision” explores the evolution of the Hudson River School through four thematic sections. Within these groupings, we see how Cole and his followers visually conveyed powerful ideas and ideals about nature, culture, religion, and history to a fledging Republic, one still searching for a collective national identity. The first section of the exhibition, ‘The Grand American Tour’, features paintings of the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountain regions, long celebrated for their scenic beauty as seen in such natural wonders as Lake George and Niagara Falls, as well as man-made historic sites. These were the destinations that attracted both artists and travelers. The second section, ‘American Artists Afield’, contains works made during the latter half of the century by Hudson River School artists who sought inspiration further from home.
The paintings of Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill and Martin Johnson Heade illustrate how these painters embraced the role of artist-explorer, thrilling audiences with images of the awe-inspiring landscape of the American West, Yosemite Valley, and tropical South America. ‘Dreams of Arcadia: Americans in Italy’ features luminous canvases wrought by Thomas Cole, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and others celebrating Italy as the center of the Old World and the principal destination for Americans on the Grand Tour through Europe. Viewed as the storehouse of Western culture, Italy was a living laboratory of the classical past, offering a survey of the artistic heritage from antiquity. It also provided a striking contrast to the untamed wilderness of North America. In the final section of the exhibition, ‘Grand Landscape Narratives’, all of these ideas converge in Thomas Cole’s epic five-painting series, The Course of Empire (c. 1834-1836). Through this sweeping visual narrative, Cole traces the evolution of a great civilization from an untamed landscape to its ultimate decay into ruin. Through these iconic works — equally heralded at their time of creation as they remain today — Cole provides a cautionary tale and explores the tension between Americans’ deep veneration of the wilderness and their equally ardent celebration of progress.
That celebration of progress ultimately would grind to a halt nearly a quarter-century later, as the nation became engulfed by the flames of Civil War. In the years following the war, the aesthetic orientation of the United States abruptly shifted from Great Britain to the Continent, especially France. The appeal of figure painting grew somewhat at the expense of landscape, but the face of landscape painting itself altered with the influence of the softer, more intimate French Barbizon-style. By the turn of the twentieth century — perhaps coincident with the deaths of Church and Bierstadt in 1900 and 1902, respectively — the Hudson River School had all but vanished.
The Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina has a collection of European and American fine and decorative art that spans several centuries. The museum building was transformed from an urban department store into a light-filled space with 25 galleries. The museum has a Renaissance and Baroque collection – a gift from the Samuel Kress Foundation, which features Old Master paintings, many of which were commissioned by churches in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries. Nativity scenes, Madonna and Child paintings, and scenes from the Old and New Testaments are featured in the museum’s upstairs galleries. The museum also has a large and rare Nativity fresco transferred to canvas by Sandro Botticelli, a pre-eminent Florentine Renaissance artist. Also in the museum’s permanent collection are “The Seine at Giverny” by Claude Monet and art glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The decorative arts holdings at the museum number around 3,000 objects, ranging in date primarily between the 17th and 20th centuries. Some Asian objects in the Turner Collection date back to the T’ang Dynasty. Holdings include silver, Chinese export porcelain, contemporary art glass, American furniture, textiles and sculpture. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.columbiamuseum.org