The Permanent Collection - West Building - National Gallery of Art, Washington DC - September 21 and 22, 2025

South-West Point, Conanicut - 1878 / 1879

 

William Trost Richards

American, 1833 - 1905

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

 

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

 

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

 

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

 

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

 

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

 

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

 

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

 

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

 

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

 

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

 

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

 

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

 

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.

 

The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.

 

The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.

 

The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.

 

The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art

 

Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”

 

www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...

.

Done