Visit to the Pennsylvania Academy

I could tell you that last week we visited the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but that would not be entirely accurate. What we did do is visit the Albuquerque Museum, one of four venues for this traveling show from the Academy.

Though it is less than one percent of their collection in the exhibition called “Making American Artists: Stories from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1776-1976” it is, in fact, an overview of their collection installed chronologically in categories such as Portraits and Landscapes.

I must admit that American paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries are not my first love, but one can find gems in any collection. The Albuquerque Museum sometimes helps fund their shows by asking those interested to sponsor a picture from the show and we chose “The Peaceable Kingdom”. Between 1820 and 1849 the Quaker minister and painter Edward Hicks painted more than one hundred versions of which 62 are still known to exist. The allegory is from the biblical passage of Isaiah (11:6) “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” This small version was painted circa 1833.

One icon work from Philadelphia’s collection is Gilbert Stuart’s “George Washington (The Lansdowne Portrait) 1796. The life-sized portrait is known by the name of its first owner William Petty, the first Marquess of Lansdowne, a former British Prime Minister.

Another life-sized portrait in the show was a favorite of the curator in the family, my wife, is Charles Willson Peale’s “The Artist in His Museum” 1822. My wife finds his dramatic invitation to visit as he raises a curtain on his collection irresistible.

Painted when the artist was 81 it shows Peale not only as an artist but the scientist who organized and opened America’s first natural history and art museums in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

In Winslow Homer’s “Fox Hunt” 1893 the hunters are not people but crows forming a dark hovering mass above the struggling fox trying to get away in the deep Maine snow.

Though I find 19th-century American portraits boring this portrait by Thomas Hart Benton of “Aaron” 1941 has such personality that I would love to sit down next to this farmer and hear his story.

One of the things I enjoy about writing these missives is learning something new. In this case, that Jackson Pollock was a student of Benton.

What artist can you think of as more American than Andrew Wyeth? In 1948 he painted, arguably, his most famous painting, “Christina’s World”. The painting in this exhibition was painted in 1950 and I find it has that same atmosphere of being in one’s own world without the hustle and bustle of our everyday surroundings. I used to feel that way when I rode my bike through Central Park in Manhattan where I could ignore the chaos of the streets around me. The painting here is called “Young America”.

To see a small selection of images in a spacious installation but not covering an entire museum allows one to compare and contrast and more easily appreciate the images that capture your attention.