Founded in Hartford, Connecticut, more than 150 years ago, the Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States, and it contains one of the most important collections of American art anywhere. Each work in its world-renowned collection of American paintings is reproduced in this gorgeously illustrated two-volume set, including masterworks by nearly every leading artist of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser tells the extraordinary history of the museum, offers informative biographies of both famous and obscure artists, and provides comprehensive entries on each painting. The story of the nineteenth-century private collectors who established the public collections, the contemporary artists who influenced the selection of paintings, and the unusual acquisitions in the first half of the twentieth century renders a fascinating profile of cultural development in the United States. The Atheneum`s holdings of more than 550 American paintings, with outstanding Hudson River school landscapes and an especially rich representation of Connecticut artists, began with museum founder Daniel Wadsworth`s donation of his private collection of American landscapes. Later gifts included the post-Civil War picture gallery left by Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, widow of the inventor-manufacturer Samuel Colt. This beautiful catalogue enables even those who cannot visit the museum to enjoy the fine collection of the American wing."These volumes are an important contribution to the literature on the history of American painting and to the study of patronage and culture. Elizabeth Kornhauser has made excellent use of rich material."--Linda S. Ferber, The Brooklyn MuseumElizabeth Mankin Kornhauser is curator of American paintings, sculpture, and drawings at the Wadsworth Atheneum and author of Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic, published by Yale University Press. Copublished with the Wadsworth Atheneum.

American Paintings Before 1945 in the Wadsworth Atheneum

Arts & Photography

Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Founded in Hartford, Connecticut, more than 150 years ago, the Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States, and it contains one of the most important collections of American art anywhere. Each work in its world-renowned collection of American paintings is reproduced in this gorgeously illustrated two-volume set, including masterworks by nearly every leading artist of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser tells the extraordinary history of the museum, offers informative biographies of both famous and obscure artists, and provides comprehensive entries on each painting. The story of the nineteenth-century private collectors who established the public collections, the contemporary artists who influenced the selection of paintings, and the unusual acquisitions in the first half of the twentieth century renders a fascinating profile of cultural development in the United States. The Atheneum`s holdings of more than 550 American paintings, with outstanding Hudson River school landscapes and an especially rich representation of Connecticut artists, began with museum founder Daniel Wadsworth`s donation of his private collection of American landscapes. Later gifts included the post-Civil War picture gallery left by Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, widow of the inventor-manufacturer Samuel Colt. This beautiful catalogue enables even those who cannot visit the museum to enjoy the fine collection of the American wing."These volumes are an important contribution to the literature on the history of American painting and to the study of patronage and culture. Elizabeth Kornhauser has made excellent use of rich material."--Linda S. Ferber, The Brooklyn MuseumElizabeth Mankin Kornhauser is curator of American paintings, sculpture, and drawings at the Wadsworth Atheneum and author of Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic, published by Yale University Press. Copublished with the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Founded in Hartford, Connecticut, more than 150 years ago, the Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States, and it contains one of the most important collections of American art anywhere. Each work in its world-renowned collection of American paintings is reproduced in this gorgeously illustrated two-volume set, including masterworks by nearly every leading artist of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser tells the extraordinary history of the museum, offers informative biographies of both famous and obscure artists, and provides comprehensive entries on each painting. The story of the nineteenth-century private collectors who established the public collections, the contemporary artists who influenced the selection of paintings, and the unusual acquisitions in the first half of the twentieth century renders a fascinating profile of cultural development in the United States. The Atheneum's holdings of more than 550 American paintings, with outstanding Hudson River school landscapes and an especially rich representation of Connecticut artists, began with museum founder Daniel Wadsworth's donation of his private collection of American landscapes. Later gifts included the post-Civil War picture gallery left by Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, widow of the inventor-manufacturer Samuel Colt. This beautiful catalogue enables even those who cannot visit the museum to enjoy the fine collection of the American wing.

American Moderns on Paper presents a selection of approximately 100 of the finest watercolors, pastels, and drawings by leading American modernists from the Wadsworth Atheneum’s renowned collection of American art. Works by Sloan, O’Keeffe, Hopper, Marin, Dalí, and Wyeth, among many others, serve as notable examples of the various styles and subjects pursued by artists in America from 1910 to 1960. The catalogue entries are accompanied by artist biographies. 
Organized chronologically, and generously illustrated throughout, the catalogue is introduced by two essays exploring the historical significance of the collection and the importance to American modernists of working on paper, rather than canvas. Providing a rich history of the collection, the volume illuminates not only its historic roots, but also the concurrent national evolution of interest in watercolor and drawings.

American Moderns on Paper: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

A new look at George Caleb Bingham’s iconic river paintings and his creative process in making them George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879) moved to Missouri as a child and began painting the scenes of Missouri life for which he is now famous in the 1840s. Navigating the West explores how Bingham’s iconic river paintings reveal the cultural and economic significance of the massive Mississippi and Missouri waterways to mid-19th-century society. Focusing on the artist’s working methods and preparatory drawings, the book also explores Bingham’s representations of people and places and situates these images in a dialogue with other contemporary depictions of the region. Of particular note are two landmark essays investigating Bingham’s creative process through comparisons of infrared images of 17 of his paintings with both his preparatory drawings and the completed works, casting new light on his previously understudied process. Technical analysis of the artist’s lauded masterpiece, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, reveals Bingham’s considerable revisions to the painting. In the concluding essay, the 20th-century revival of the artist’s work is discussed within the context of American Regionalism and in light of a shifting sequence of narratives about the nation’s past and future.

Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River

Mahon, Dorothy

Barry, Claire M.

Luarca-Shoaf, Nenette

Heugh, Nancy

Walker, Andrew J.

Turk, Janeen

Benjamin, Brent R.

Other Distribution

This publication accompanies a major exhibition organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the National Gallery of Australia. It features some fifty American and fifty Australian landscape paintings produced during the period when landscape became the focus for artists in both countries. In both traditions landscapes trace the ever-changing complexities of bringing what is known to the experience of the unknown, exploring the profound relationship that we have with the land on which we live. Many of America's finest landscape painters are represented, including Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, and William Merritt Chase. Australian artists include Joseph Lyatt, Augustus Earle, John Glover, Eugene von Guerard, Louis Buvelot, and Arthur Streeton, among others.

New Worlds from Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes

Sayers, Andrew

Ellis, Amy

Johns, Elizabeth

National Gallery of Australia

Wadsworth Atheneum

Thames&Hudson

Preface and Acknowledgments by Washburn S. Oberwager
In 1865 the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church and his wife, Isabel, traveled to Jamaica on a sojourn of recovery after the tragic deaths of their two young children Herbert and Emma. A time to mourn and escape from the constant reminders found at their home, Olana, the Churches' trip to Jamaica also provided ample inspiration for Frederic. The Olana Collection includes eight oil sketches, an ink drawing, and a pencil drawing Church made in Jamaica. Five of these oil sketches on paper Church chose to mount to canvas and frame for his and Isabel's enjoyment; over the years they have hung in different rooms at Olana. From these works, and others held by the Cooper-Hewitt, Church created two major studio oils, The Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867 (the Wadsworth Atheneum) and The After Glow, 1867 (the Olana Collection). 
Within Church's oeuvre the studies of Jamaican sunsets, mountains, and foliage are particularly lovely. Church wrote of Jamaica: "The scenery is superb.... I have accomplished a great amount of work―but there is so much to do that I am at a loss to decide day by day―what to paint."
The 2010 exhibit at Olana will help explain Church's working process by showing Sunset Jamaica and the resulting studio work The After Glow together; it will include five works never before exhibited and reveal Church's interesting use of his photography collection both as an aide-mémoire and as substrate for sketching. Fern Hunting among Picturesque Mountains includes forty-eight color illustrations, as well as essays by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser (on Church's Jamaica work) and Katherine Manthorne (about Church's friends and fellow artists who also traveled to Jamaica to paint).

Fern Hunting among These Picturesque Mountains: Frederic Edwin Church in Jamaica

Manthorne, Katherine E.

Cornell University Press

Stieglitz, O'Keeffe & American Modernism

Lyons, Maura

During his first years as an Arts and Crafts furniture maker, from about mid-1900 to early 1904, Gustav Stickley and his designers created the most significant cabinetwork his firm would ever produce. For the most part made of quarter-sawn American oak, this furniture was substantial, subtly proportioned, essentially rectilinear, and built using traditional joinery--for instance, tenon and key, dovetail, pinned through tenons--and employing hand-wrought copper or iron hardware. These structural elements were both functional and symbolic, literally holding the furniture together while also expressing its moral aesthetic: though a factory product, every piece was solidly, honestly made. Stephen Gray is among those few who, early on, recognized both the inherent beauty of Arts and Crafts furniture and the value of the Craftsman Ideal. His collection includes many of the rarest forms and has few equals, but in two regards, it is almost singular: Stephen Gray lives with this major collection and has embraced the Craftsman Ideal in a beautiful, simple, personal, regionally sensitive manner. He lives in a nineteenth-century country house and has integrated an important collection with the ideas of decorating, lifestyle, and sensitivity to environment that were central to the Craftsman enterprise. Through Stephen Gray's collection, it is possible to explore the disparate values of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Arts and Crafts interior, and the tensions inherent in the pursuit of an aesthetically simple Ideal life. This lavishly illustrated book features Stickley's furniture, including many photographs of Stickley designs in use, and it also includes some fine examples of art pottery, lighting fixtures, tiles, and color woodblock prints. The essays by David Cathers on Stickley's early work and Tommy McPherson, who compares Stephen Gray's living room to Stickley's own living room at Craftsman Farms, put Stickley's work into perspective. The introduction by Stephen Gray touches on collecting and living with Stickley.

At Home With Gustav Stickley: Arts & Crafts from the Stephen Gray Collection

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Cathers, David

Thompson, Tommy

Antiques & Collectibles

A major reexamination of the father of the Hudson River School in relation to his European roots and travels Thomas Cole (1801–1848), arguably the greatest American landscape artist of his generation, is presented here in a new light: as an international figure, born in England, and in dialogue with the major landscape painters of the age, including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. Cole traveled in Europe from 1829 to 1832. Thomas Cole’s Journey reexamines his seminal works of 1832–36—notably The Oxbow and Course of Empire—as a culminating response to his experiences of British art and society and of Italian landscape painting. These, combined with Cole’s passion for the American wilderness and his horror of the industrial revolution in Britain, led him to create works that offer a distinctive, even dissident, response to the economic and political rise of the United States and the ecological changes then underway. This groundbreaking book also discusses Cole’s influence on later artists, from Frederic Edwin Church to Ed Ruscha.

Thomas Cole's Journey: Atlantic Crossings

Barringer, Tim

Metropolitan Museum of Art

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