Nov. 23, 2024 - Feb. 8, 2025
Main Gallery

Exhibit Events:

Members Only Reception: Thurs, Nov. 21, 2024, 5-7 pm - Members please RSVP by Nov. 14th by calling the Museum Front Desk at 970.962.2410

Free Days: Wed, Dec 4, 2024 & Wed, Jan. 22, 2025

About the Exhibition:

Drawn from the collection of Reading Public Museum, this rich exhibition features the bounty and beauty of American landscape painting from the early nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century. It explores the Hudson River School and the emergence of Impressionism and Tonalism at the turn of the century as well as Modernist trends in landscape interpretation.

More than sixty-five paintings help tell the story of American art from its refined naturalistic foundations to the absorption and assimilation of avant-garde movements from Europe reinterpreted within the American context. Landscape artists from the nineteenth century include Thomas Birch, Frederic Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Aaron Draper Shattuck, Paul Weber, and Hermann Herzog; the shift from Impressionism and Tonalism in turn of-the-century America is demonstrated through the works of George Inness, Ralph Albert Blakelock, John Francis Murphy, N.C. Wyeth, Childe Hassam, and Robert Spencer, among others.

Modernist landscapes by George Bellows, Arthur Bowen Davies, Benton Spruance, John Fulton Folinsbee, and Andrew Wyeth chart the path to abstract and expressionistic compositions in the twentieth century and beyond.