Loving American Art

My daughter has been in college at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, and she's now graduated.  I'll miss the fun of our numerous visits, and one particular thing I’ll miss about the small community is the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, just north of the downtown (itself traversed by the famous Lincoln Highway). During a recent visit I picked up two books in the gift shop.

I dearly love Hudson River School paintings and gravitated to Judith Hansen O’Toole’s Different Views in Hudson River School Painting (Columbia University press, 2005). O’Toole is the museum’s director. As explained in the book, Hudson River School artists included Thomas Cole, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Asher B. Durand, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Albert Bierstadt, John Frederick Kensett, Frederick Edwin Church, Thomas Moran, Worthington Whittredge, John William Casilear, and others.  One practice among artists in the school was to display paintings in thematically related pairs, groupings, and series. A private collector, who remains anonymous, has collected Hudson River School paintings for decades. The collection has been displayed, but O’Toole--who had worked in the initial exhibition at Penn State's art museum (now named the Palmer Museum)---suggested a book about the collection, and this is it!

She surveyed the many paintings and, in the spirit of the Hudson River artists, selected pairs of paintings to discuss common interests, themes, and beliefs of the artists. The pairs in the book aren’t necessarily identical locations, but chapter 8 does feature contrasting interpretations of a particular scene. The book doesn’t include much biographical data about the artists, as the author states, because other books include such information, and her goal to make these aesthetic and interpretative comparisons. Her introduction, “American Scenery: Themes, Symbols and Pairings in Hudson River School Painting” is helpful in discussing the beliefs, goals, and practices of the artists, as well as their similarities to certain European painters like Caspar David Friedrich and other Romantic painters who had similar sensibilities.

But, of course, it was the American landscape that so moved the Hudson River School in their paintings and philosophies. If you love these works, you’ll find this book fascinating as O’Toole pairs paintings according to times of day, weather and mood, seasons, “nature without man,” people’s activities in nature, human impact on nature, and interpretations of the same location.

I've begun to donate to the Westmoreland Museum, which features a variety of artists like Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, John Singleton Copley, James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Mary Stevenson Cassatt, Childe Hassam, John Sloan, some of the Hudson River School artists listed above, and numerous others. Furniture, folk art, samplers, clocks, sculptures, and paintings are displayed around the museum.  If you can’t get to Greensburg yourself----which, I know from repeat personal experience, is an hour to an hour and a half drive from the Pittsburgh airport---you can order the other book I purchased at the bookstore, Barbara L. Jones’ Picturing America: Signature Works from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art (Westmoreland Museum of American Art, 2010). 

Leafing through the book, I recall the several visits we made to the facility. I myself liked the landscapes, including those depicting natural scenes in western Pennsylvania and urban scenes in Pittsburgh, including gritty depiction of the steel mills. But I became a fan of the pastoral landscapes of George Hetzel (1826-1899), a Pittsburgh-area artist who formed his own informal artists association called the Scalp Level school. His style pays homage to Durand and Cole.

The museum's website is http://www.wmuseumaa.org/