Variations on America
Masterworks from
American Art Forum Collections
Smithsonian American Art Museum
April 13 - July 29, 2007
Title: Watching Ships, Gloucester, 1875
Artist: Winslow Homer (American 1836-1910)
Medium: Watercolor and Gouache on Paper
Collection of Nan Tucker McEvoy
Image Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum
Masterworks. When an exhibit includes 'masterworks' it means the best of the best. Though when it comes from the Smithsonian American
Art Museum (SAAM) their choices are endless. So how to make it different. SAAM explores the vision and passion of private collectors who are formally
affiliated with the art museum.
Title: The Breakfast, 1911
Artist: William McGregor Paxton (American 1869-1941)
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Collection of Ted Slavin
Image Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum
American Impressionist William McGregor Paxton was known as an excellent portraitist. His works are found alongside that of Winslow
Homer, Georgia O'Keeffe and many others.
Title: Evening in Gloucester Harbor, 1871
Artist: Francis A. Silva (American 1835-1886)
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Collection of Paul Leach and Susan Winokur
Image Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum
Francis Augusta Silva was a Hudson River School painter. His parents discouraged his art ambitions and he went on to try his
hand apprenticing with various fields before settling into life as a sign painter. The outbreak of the American Civil War altered his plans. He
served with the New York State militia. Returning to civilian life he found some success as a marine painter. He was associated
with the American Luminism movement and some of his last works evoke images of the Impressionists.
|
Title: Palms, about 1938-40
Artist: Joseph Stella (American 1877-1946)
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Private Collection, Washington D.C.
Image Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum
|
Joseph Stella's early works are futurist in nature. Notably he infused his beloved New York as an industrial landscape repeatedly
rendering the Brooklyn Bridge seeing it as a shrine that showed the best of all the latest he saw in the 'new civilization of America'. As his career
drew to a close his preferred subjects were more conservative in nature.
|
Title: The Marshes of the Hudson, 1878
Artist: Sanford Robinson Gifford (American 1823-1880)
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Private Collection
Image Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum
Closely associated with the Hudson River School of artists, Sanford Robinson Gifford developed a love of landscape painting after
he visited the Catskills and Berkshires.
Approximately 75 major oil paintings, sculptures and works on paper are included.
Smithsonian American Art Museum: April 13 - July 29, 2007
Smithsonian American Art Museum at
www.americanart.si.edu
| 