“The Poetry of Nature”

The latest exhibit at the Brandywine River Museum of Art will explore some of the best American landscape paintings.

Just in time for spring, “The Poetry of Nature: A Golden Age of American Landscape Painting” will open March 19 at the Brandywine River Museum of Art. Featuring masterworks by Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, John F. Kensett, William T. Richards, William L. Sonntag and other giants of the Hudson River School, it will be on view at the Brandywine River Museum of Art through June 12. Organized by the New-York Historical Society from its vast holdings of works by the Hudson River School, the exhibition features more than 40 paintings created between 1818 and 1886. 

More than 25 celebrated American artists, including Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Chambers, Sanford Gifford, Thomas H. Hotchkiss, Jervis McEntee, Louisa Minot, Francis A. Silva and Josephine Walters will be represented in the exhibition. The Hudson River School is considered the first art movement in the United States and one that developed a distinctly American vision of the landscape. The artists were inspired to explore the landscape by the writers of their time. Their stories, essays and poems extolled the pristine, primeval quality and symbolic virtue of America’s natural beauty. Hudson River artists’ powerful interpretations of American scenery is illuminated in the exhibition’s arrangement highlighting the regions they frequently painted—along the Hudson River, through the Catskill Mountains and other regions of New York, and beyond to New England and the mid-Atlantic states. The boundless vistas, stately forests, magnificent mountains, gleaming rivers and lakes and luminous skies the Hudson River School artists created in their paintings shaped national and cultural identity not only for their own time, but also formed an enduring legacy for future generations.

For more, visit www.brandywine.org.

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