Description
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) has been exhibiting and collecting American art since its founding in 1805. In recent years, PAFA has advanced a notable program of exhibitions inspired by particular strengths in its holdings of historic American paintings. These efforts have been recognized by an annual audience of more than 220,000 visitors, 70 percent of whom come from beyond the Philadelphia area.
PAFA now seeks funding for a concertedly collection-based exhibition and catalogue project: From the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic will be presented from June to December of 2019 in PAFA’s main Fisher Brooks Gallery in the new Hamilton Building, and in the Richard C. von Hess Works on Paper Gallery in PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building.
From the Schuylkill to the Hudson will delve into the important and underexplored tradition of landscape representation in Philadelphia from the Early American Republic to the Civil War (1775-1861), tracing its roots and development, and its seminal influence on the works of the Hudson River School. Not since the Corcoran’s 1986 exhibition, Views and Visions: American Landscape Before 1830 , have an exhibition and publication (now out-of-print) been devoted to early American landscape painting. Philadelphia’s key role in the development of American landscape art has never been the subject of a major museum exhibition. The PAFA project will be executed by Dr. Anna Marley, a senior PAFA curator who completed a doctoral thesis on the subject.
The works in the exhibition will be drawn almost exclusively from PAFA’s extraordinary collection. Artists who will figure prominently include Thomas Birch and Thomas Doughty, as well as Charles Willson Peale, James Peale, William Russell Birch, John Lewis Krimmel, and Joshua Shaw. The exhibition will be organized thematically and chronologically in order to showcase the ways in which Philadelphia water views in particular constituted some of the earliest and most influential sites within the visual culture of American landscape.
The exhibition will conclude with a selection of Hudson River School landscapes, including examples by Thomas Cole, who began his career as a landscape painter after living and training in Philadelphia in the early 1820s. Featured works will include highly notable recent acquisitions such as Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada (1875) by Frederic Edwin Church. In addition to paintings and prints, the exhibition will share the broader story of landscape representation in Philadelphia through objects including domestic and export ceramics and painted furniture.
The accompanying catalogue will not only provide a record of the exhibition but will also serve as an ongoing collection resource. It will be the first publication to offer color reproductions of the museum’s early landscape collection. A scholarly essay by Marley will address landscape imagery in early republican Philadelphia in painting and the decorative arts; and contributing author Ramey Mize will examine the technological and ecological valences of early Schuylkill imagery.
PAFA is already building programming partnerships for the presentation with the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Preservation, the Fairmount Waterworks Interpretive Center, Bartram’s Garden/John Bartram Association, and the Woodlands. A multi-part lecture series will connect the works in the exhibition to the history of environmentalism, national parks and evolving notions of nature in American life. PAFA will also host a Scholar’s Day and Public Dialogues Day, a new annual event that brings together historic scholars and contemporary artists to connect ideas about the past with the art-making traditions of the present.
Grant funds would be applied to all costs associated with producing both the exhibition and catalogue.
From the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic , like other collection-based exhibitions the Foundation’s American Art Program has recently supported, will demonstrate that collection-based projects need not be redundant surveys, but rather can offer valuable, original content that moves the field forward.
