American Art Masterworks at Seattle Art Museum

American Art Masterworks
Seattle Art Museum
Sat Oct 11 – Sun Dec 7 2014


I am very excited by the new American Painting exhibit at SAM, I have been to visit several times and wanted to write about it.  Most of the work is from private local collections and will be donated to the museum in the future.  There is a wide range of paintings on display, from large to small, portrait to still-life to landscape, the work is wide ranging and showcases some of the most important American painters from the 18th through the early 20th century.

From their website:

"This fall will find an especially large and rich display of new additions to the American art galleries."

"First among them is a landmark acquisition for the museum: Raphaelle Peale’s Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup, painted in Philadelphia in the great age of Enlightenment, 1814. The painting is an armchair adventurer’s virtual tour of the world as the artist and his family saw it from their place in the cultural and scientific center of America, which Philadelphia was at this time. The still life brings together a silver mounted ostrich egg from Africa, a Chinese export porcelain cream pitcher, an Asian celadon bowl, and strawberries hybridized on the Peale family’s experimental farm."

 

"SAM’s new Peale still life will join other American art masterworks, from John Singleton Copley’s great portrait of Silvester Gardiner, from 1772, to some of the finest impressionist paintings created on either side of the Atlantic at the end of the nineteenth century."

The above landscape by painter Rockwell Kent, Ocean Headland, was among my favorite works in the show, it showed the coast of Maine.

 

The American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam (1859-1935) whose Avenue of the Allies, pictured below, filled with flags fluttering in the breeze was another favorite painting.  His cityscape of New York (shown above) is titled Spring on West 78th Street.

 

"Childe Hassam’s glorious The Room of Flowers, of 1894, the artist’s magnificent tribute to poet and gardener Celia Thaxter, his view of her blossom-filled parlor in which color appears to have exploded on the canvas. Three galleries will be devoted to masterworks—some familiar to regular visitors but many of them new on view." 

Williard Leroy Metcalf, (1858-1925) painted the above work, Cornish Hills, a snowy Vermont landscape painting.

This painting by John Singer Sargent was done while the artist was in Venice.

John Singer Sargent's full length portrait, A Morning Walk.

Another painting from Sargent's time spent in Italy shows the women of the town gathering to wash clothes.

A painting by Mary Cassatt was also included in the exhibit.

William McGregor Paxton, (1869 – 1941) painted the above portrait titled The Pink Ruff.

"Winslow Homer’s haunting marine subject, Lost on the Grand Banks, of 1885, a view of impending disaster off the coast of Newfoundland."

"James McNeill Whistler’s elegant tonal study, Arrangement in Black No. 2—Portrait of Mrs. Louis Huth, done in 1872-73, shortly after the artist painted his famous mother, whose decorative portrait inspired this one."