Menconi + Schoelkopf’s exhibition of nineteenth-century painting presents a broad range of stylistic development and experimentation that mirrors the trajectory of America’s growth as a nation through the early 1900s. The journey begins with two works from at home and abroad by the English-born father of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, who devoted his career to recording nature in its glorious beauty. In his 1830s Journal, the artist records “the sublimity of untamed wilderness, and the majesty of the eternal elements” that inspired his depiction of Mount Schroon in the Catskills. Both paintings included in the exhibition have descended in the family of the artist over four generations. Three landscapes by George Inness reveal the range of stylistic experimentation from a career spanning fifty years, and led to contemplative, idyllic scenes where man and nature coexist. In Martin Johnson Heade’s Fighting Hummingbirds with Pink Orchid from the last quarter of the century, the lush Brazilian landscape provides the background with awe-inspiring nature shown in close view as a pair of male hummingbirds hover alongside a gorgeous crimson cattleya orchid. This work was first owned by Ramón Paez who travelled to South America with Heade in the 1860s. Paez was an artist himself and the son of General Jose Antonio Paez, the first president of Venezuela. Ramón worked as a diplomat interested in opening a more robust dialogue between North America and South America.

Works on paper are among the exhibition’s highlights from the decades following the Civil War. For Winslow Homer, the watercolor medium allowed spontaneity and portability, and was naturally suited for his working vacations in Cuba and the Caribbean. His watercolors became popular for capturing scenes of women at leisure, and in two works included here, the luminous tropical setting was a source of equal fascination. John La Farge shared this same interest in showing the figure in harmony with nature while placing emphasis on accurate local details, seen in a charming Newport watercolor and a richly hued example from an important South Pacific trip. In other works on paper, Maurice Prendergast demonstrates the high-keyed palette and tightly knit composition that captures the sophistication of turn-of-the-century urban life in New York City’s Central Park. And for J. Alden Weir, a founding member of the Society of Painters in Pastel, the medium of pastel offered a degree of experimentation and expression perhaps not possible in oil, as he sensitively portrayed his wife Anna Dwight Baker during a three-week stay on the Isle of Man in the summer of 1889. A tour de force example by Weir, this work is presented in its original Thomas A. Wilmurt, New York frame. Through all of these works, the important currents in American painting of the nineteenth century are on display, and we invite you to experience these works online or in our gallery.