One hundred years ago the Panama Canal linked east to west, opening for the first time in history a water passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Now the Panama Canal Expansion Project, slated for completion in 2016, will open a new water lane to more and larger ships. Celebrating today s Panama project, Oh Panama! looks back to the determined and spirited efforts of the architects and crews who accomplished the 1914 canal that was captured in paintings by Jonas Lie from the West Point Museum Collection, United States Military Academy. Lie s paintings continue today to impress viewers as a sublime and beautiful document of man s relentless quest to conquer nature and harness its riches. 
 Norwegian-born painter Jonas Lie (1880-1940) inspired by a motion picture documentary of the construction of the canal visited the Panama Canal Zone for three months in 1913. He was enthralled by the feats of engineering required to dig the Culebra Cut, as well as the sublime visual qualities of the massive trench being carved across the Isthmus of Panama. Working tirelessly in the intense tropical heat, he produced oil sketches and drawings and took careful notes on the technical aspects of the canal construction. 
 Recognized by his peers as a scientist and a poet for his depictions of New York City, Lie s canvasses were both historical documents of technological progress and dramatic interpretations of the urban environment. The thirty known pictures he made of Panama are lively and colorful, capturing the spirit of that endeavor as well as its heroic quality and monumental scale. Lie recalled the Panama experience as a pivotal moment in his career, one from which he received national recognition for his work and also developed the aesthetic and technical strategies that influenced his landscape compositions from that point forward. 
 When Lie returned to New York, he exhibited twenty-eight paintings from the Panama cycle at the Knoedler Gallery; two The Conquerors and Culebra Cut were purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts before the exhibition embarked on a national tour in 1914. The exhibition was very popular with broad interest in Lie s paintings fueled by publicity photographs, news reports, and the release of documentary films following the canal s progress, such as the Edison Company s The Joining of the Two Oceans, The Panama Canal.

Oh Panama! Jonas Lie Paints the Panama Canal

Bartholomew F. Bland

Hudson River Museum

Kirsten M. Jensen

Arts & Photography

Hudson River Museum and James A. Michener Musuem

George Hand Wright (1872-1951), an illustrator, watercolorist, pastelist, and etcher, was born in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania was educated at in Philadelphia at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Spring Garden Institute, where the later founders of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri, John Sloan and William Glackens, were classmates. This book, the first biography of Wright, traces his life in art, beginning with his apprenticeship to a lithographer, and his year of European travel where he filled sketchbooks with character studies that captured "the very essence of his subject" according to one contemporary critic. Wright's subsequent 40-year career as an illustrator coincided with what has been called "the Golden Age of American illustration." Wright's genius as an illustrator was recognized by the editors of Harpers, Scribner's, Century, Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1907, Wright moved from New York City to Westport, Connecticut, and soon was recognized as the Dean of the bourgeoning group of artists followed him as members of the Westport art colony. Wright's relocation to what was then a rural section of New England produced a shift in his subject matter. Abandoning the scenes of sophisticated urban life which had occupied Wright in New York, he now focused on the ramshackle life of small towns and farms. His etchings became pungent with the life of the soil and the last echoes of the leisure and romance of the Old South. The reader may find the most interesting aspect of this book to be the author's favorable comparison of George Wright's art with the work of his peers, including the illustrations of Howard Chandler Christy, the watercolors and pastels of Winslow Homer and Childe Hassam, and the etchings of John Taylor Arms and Kerr Eby

George Hand Wright:An Artist's Life Examined

Pen Press

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Books by Kirsten M. Jensen