RALEIGH, N.C.—Opening on February 15, 2009, Highlights of the American Collection displays a selection of 19 of the finest paintings from the Museum’s American collection, which has been off view since June 2007. The paintings will be arranged thematically, allowing for interesting and surprising conversations among works by different artists from different generations.
“The paintings will not be arranged chronologically—that is usually the least interesting way to display art,” said John Coffey, deputy director for art and curator of American and modern art. “These paintings have been off view for a year and a half, and we only have a few months to show them before they are reinstalled in the new gallery building. Why not have a little fun with their arrangement?” he said.
The selections range in date from 1770 to 1938 and encompass several genres, including colonial portraits, landscapes, and American impressionism. The star of the exhibition—and one of the Museum’s true masterpieces—is the stunning group portrait of Sir William Pepperrell and His Family, by John Singleton Copley, one of this nation’s first great artists. Copley painted the Pepperrell Family in 1778, shortly after settling in London. It served as an advertisement for the young man’s talents, demonstrating his ability to handle complicated and engaging groups of figures as well as his genius for light and illusion.
The Museum’s conservators have recently completed the first extensive cleaning of this painting in 40 years; it was taken off view in July 2005. Removal of the yellowed varnish has revealed new details of the composition and restored much of the 18th-century luster to this celebrated portrayal of an American Tory gentleman and his young family.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Winslow Homer’s Weaning the Calf, with its Tom Sawyer–like vision of a boy’s summer down on the farm, contrasts sharply with A Tough Story by the New York painter John George Brown. Brown depicts a group of young Irish boys getting together to swap tales of life on the dangerous streets of New York. Painted a decade apart, these pictures present different, almost incompatible, realities of post–Civil War America.
Nature is a major storyline in the exhibition. The first important art movement in the United States was devoted to celebrating the landscape of the New World. Albert Bierstadt—foreign-born like so many 19th-century Americans—trumpeted the unspoiled grandeur of the American West in paintings such as the Museum’s Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite.
Once the wilderness was mapped, Americans turned away from vast panoramas of the natural world to the cultivated landscape and the domesticated nature of the garden. Frederick Frieseke’s The Garden Parasol revels in the pleasures of idleness. The story is simple enough: a woman (the artist’s wife) receives a visitor in her backyard. But the story is incidental to the joy of color, sunlight, and the comforting embrace of a hedged garden. Frieseke’s painting—one of the Museum’s most popular—recently received a beautiful new frame in a turn-of-the-century style, gilded in pale lemon-gold.
The exhibition also includes works not often on view, among them Corn Harvest on the Brandywine by N.C. Wyeth, the famed illustrator and father of Andrew. Commissioned as a cover for the magazine Progressive Farmer, the painting honors rural America.
The Museum’s American Gallery was closed in June 2007 to create temporary art storage and a staging area for the upcoming transfer of the art collection to the new gallery building. The full American collection will be installed in the new building.
Exhibition Details
Tickets are not required for this free special exhibition. Highlights of the American Collection will remain on view through July 2009.
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Docent-led tours of the exhibition will be available beginning Tuesday, February 24 for groups of 10 or more. To schedule a group, contact the tour coordinator at (919) 664-6820 at least four weeks in advance. For more information about the exhibition or the North Carolina Museum of Art, visit www.ncartmuseum.org or call (919) 839-NCMA.
Highlights of the American Collection was organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. This exhibition is also made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.