Exhibitions
Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts
August 3, 2019 - December 1, 2019
This summer, the Cape Ann Museum will exhibit some 50 original works by renowned American artist Winslow Homer. The exhibition will be the first close examination of the formation of this great artist as a marine painter. The Cape Ann Museum will be the sole venue for this exhibition, which will include loans from some 40 public and private collections. The Arkell Museum has loaned three of our Homer paintings: On the Beach, 1869; The See-Saw, ca. 1873; and Woman on the Beach, Marshfield, 1874. Of special note is the exciting reunion of the Arkell Museum's On the Beach and Beach Scene from the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, on loan at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid, Spain) seen below right (the Arkell Museum's On the Beach is the larger painting on the right). Homer cut the canvas apart after receiving scathing reviews at the National Academy of Design in 1869. Their 2019 reunion is a rare moment in art history!
The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York
February 8–May 12, 2019
James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania
June 1, 2019 - September 8, 2019
The moon—its face, color, and enduring myth—threads through the tapestry of American landscape painting, holding timeless allure for artists everywhere. The Hudson River Museum presents a stunning exhibition devoted to the allure of the moon for American painters, whose art has reflected the eternal fascination with our closest celestial body. It is the first major museum examination of the moon as it relates to the story of the American nocturne, as it developed from the early 1820s through the late 1960s. Joining the exhibition from the Arkell Museum's collection is Winslow Homer's 1874 watercolor Moonlight.
The exhibition features more than 50 works of art, highlighting key painters who depicted the moon, from the early 19th-century masterpieces of Thomas Cole, the father of the Hudson River School, who embraced a kind of longing Romanticism that the astronomical body symbolized, to late works by famed illustrator Norman Rockwell, represented by his depictions of a long-held romantic yearning finally fulfilled–America’s triumphant lunar landing in 1969. All of the works in the exhibition underscore how the Romantic idea of the moon held an inexorable pull for artists and was central to its depiction of landscape.
