Hudson River Museum presentsThe Panoramic River. the Hudson and the Thames, an exhibition on view February 2 – May 19, 2013.
Robert Havell, Jr. (1793-1878), Hudson River North to Croton Point, 1851. Oil on canvas, 37 x 51 inches. Collection of the Ossining Historical Society.
The exhibition explores the panoramic vista as the ideal expression for a new, all-embracing way of seeing the landscape that influenced how the public and artists perceived it as well. By the early 19th century, painters such as Robert Havell Jr. worked to express this panoramic perspective in their choice and depiction of vistas. Havell, who emigrated from London to New York, exemplifies the influx of English artists who influenced a shared Anglo-American panoramic vocabulary as well as the evolution of American landscape painting. Havell, whose work includes panoramic publications and paintings of the Hudson River and the Thames, like other artists in the exhibition such as Thomas Cole, Jasper Cropsey and John Kensett, favored the chain of cities, suburbs and countryside along these two rivers, where horizontal planes and historical associations gave form to both artistic and cultural expression.
The Panoramic River features loans from museums, galleries, and private collections. Museums lending paintings include: Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fenimore Art Museum, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Maryland State Archives, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New-York Historical Society, and Princeton University Art Museum.
The Panoramic River is organized by Hudson River Museum co-curators Bartholomew Bland, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Laura Vookles, Chief Curator of Collections. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with additional essays by Pat Hardy, Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings, Museum of London and Geoff Snell, Doctoral Student, University of Sussex and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.
The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue have been made possible by a generous grant from the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc. www.hrm.org