Exhibitions
October 2010 - March 22, 2011
Many of the stars of the Arkell Museum’s remarkable collection of American paintings are featured in this exhibition. The exhibition showcases the rich variety of America’s landscape from a western landscape of El Capitan by Albert Bierstadt, to Winslow Homer’s dramatic crashing waves on the coast of Maine. Portraits in the exhibition include George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and everyday folk by Thomas Hart Benton. A glimpse at how American’s spent their leisure time in the mid twentieth century can be seen be seen in The Sand Lot Ball Game by Paul Sample, and in circus scenes by Jon Corbino and Ogden Pleisner. The title of the exhibition comes from Gilbert Stuart who stated: “Paint what you see and look with your own eyes.” Visitors will discover how realist artists’ interpretation of “paint what you see” changed through the decades.
June 19, 2010 - October 3, 2010
Reflections on Water in American Painting is drawn from the collections of Arthur J. Phelan. The exhibition opens with the earliest form of American maritime painting – the grand academic-style portraits of graceful sailing ships – and includes waterscapes from the sea to the lakes and rivers of the American heartland, light-flooded impressionist visions of quaint New England seaside towns, and modernist renderings of industrial waterfronts and everyday life on the water. Highlights of the exhibition include James Bard’s meticulously drawn Hudson River steamboat, Frank Benson’s marshland with more than 30 rising ducks, William Trost Richards’ breaking waves, William Merritt Chase’s intense study of the Arno River, and Reginald Marsh’s cathedral-like rendering of a New Jersey railway bridge.
Exhibition Contributing Sponsor: The Overbrook Managemnent Corporation
February 27, 2010 – June 6, 2010
The Tonalist style of painting was embraced by many American artists from the 1880s through the early 20th century. The two European styles that influenced the development of American Tonalism were Aestheticism as it was practiced by the American expatriot James Abbot McNeill Whistler; and the French Barbizon style as it was spiritually interpreted by George Inness. A limited, muted palette and a misty poetic interpretation of landscape characterize tonalist works.
