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Philadelphia Museum of Art Presents Gifts from the Philadelphia Water Color Club

In honor of the Water Color Society’s anniversary, this exhibition, open September 25 – December 2010, presents a small group of watercolors by some of the most distinguished artist-members represented in a gift from the club to the Museum in 1941.

Works by Thornton Oakley and Blanche Dillaye, early members of the Water Color Club, will be on view next to works by illustrators including Jessie Wilcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green, who studied in Howard Pyle’s illustration classes at Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute and established the city’s distinguished tradition of book illustration. Other artists, like John Dull and Henry McCarter were pupils of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts—an institution that for years collaborated with the Water Color Club in presenting its annual exhibitions.

The majority of the artists in the Museum’s Water Color Club Collection are Philadelphians, but the collection also includes work by national and international artists, including a 1949 lithograph by the Spaniard Pablo Picasso that was added to the collection in 1950. While this display highlights drawings and watercolors, some of the best-known American artists in the Water Color Club Collection are printmakers, such as John Taylor Arms, George Bellows, Isabel Bishop, and Armin Landeck.

Founded in 1900, the Philadelphia Water Color Club (now the Philadelphia Water Color Society) celebrates its 110th anniversary in 2010. Over the years, its collection has grown to include 170 works of art on paper.

Curator: Innis Howe Shoemaker, The Audrey and William H. Helfand Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs
Location: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Study Gallery, first floor, Perelman Building In celebration of the 110th Anniversary of the Philadelphia Water Color Club.

www.philamuseum.org

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