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24-Aug-2007
The beauty and history of the Susquehanna River comes to WCMFA
The magnificent exhibition "Visions of the Susquehanna: 250 Years of Paintings by American Masters" gathers two and a half centuries of art depicting the Susquehanna River from the eighteenth century to the present day. The paintings and watercolors on view from September 8 to December 2, 2007, depict the river and its tributaries running from Lake Osego, New York through Pennsylvania to the Chesapeake Bay at Havre de Grace, Maryland.
Many famous artists in the exhibition are also in the museum?s permanent collection. Visions of the Susquehanna begins with a rare 1767 landscape by famed artist Benjamin West (1738-1820) and continues with depictions of the lovely green mountains and tree-lined shallows of the Susquehanna River basin by nineteenth-century masters such as George Inness (1825-1894) and twentieth- and twenty-first century artists like Stephen Hancock (b. 1951). The human history of the river plays out across the nineteenth century in works by such major artists as Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900) and Thomas Moran (1837-1926). The nineteenth-century paintings show the growth of farms, towns, railroads and viaducts along the river. Then in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, natural beauty vies with industrialization and pollution in paintings like a striking 2006 watercolor of a foundry by the river by Matthew Daub (b. 1953) and Rob Evans? (b. 1959) haunting 1997 depiction of flocks of birds migrating above a bridge over the river. The exhibition is curated by scholar and artist Rob Evans, who lives and works by the Susquehanna River near Wrightsville, Pennsylvania. Evans and other artists featured in the exhibition, including Robert Patierno, George Sorrels and John David Wissler, will conduct a gallery talk at 2:30pm on Sunday, September 30, 2007.
A reception will celebrate the opening of the exhibition from 2:30 to 4pm on Sunday, September 9, 2007. "Visions of the Susquehanna" is mounted by the Lancaster Museum of Art, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Works in the exhibition have been loaned by prestigious museums and private collections including the Winterthur Museum and the
Toledo Museum of Art. The exhibition is sponsored by the Richard C. von
Hess Foundation. The lushly illustrated catalogue "Visions of the
Susquehanna: 250 Years of Paintings by American Masters" featuring essays by Rob Evans, Leo G. Mazow and David B. Dearinger, will be available in the Museum Shop for $25.
For more information on the Museum, please phone (301) 739-5727 or visit www.wcmfa.org. Museum hours are Tuesday through Friday from 9am to 5pm, Saturday from 9am to 4pm and Sunday from 1pm to 5pm.
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