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Frye mounts small jewels of Hudson River art
Thursday, January 27, 2000
By REGINA HACKETT
The first real art movement Americans could call their own was the Hudson River School of landscape painters, active on the East Coast from 1825 to 1878.
Led by Thomas Cole, the Hudson River painters were, first of all, great salesmen. They convinced their countrymen that, as Americans, they had a hammerlock on the sublime. Only they had the good fortune to be living in an artwork. Let Europe have its cathedrals; the open air was America's church, built by the hand of God. Thanks to the miracle of painting, the wealthy could take a little of God's handiwork home with them.
"This Tranquil Land: Hudson River Paintings From the Hersen Collection" at the Frye Art Museum is a version of the exhibit that traveled in the South in the 1990s.
Although Michel and Victoria Hersen live in Portland, the Frye exhibit is the first time the bulk of their collection has been shown in the Northwest.
This Tranquil Land: Hudson River Paintings From the Hersen Collection. Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave. Through April 16. Free admission, free parking. Hours: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursdays till 9; Sundays, noon-5 p.m. 206-622-9250; www.fryeart.org
Just as the Northwest isn't the place one would expect to find Hudson River School collectors, the Hersens don't collect typical Hudson River material. They favor small jewels over vast panoramas. Most of the 62 oil paintings, watercolors and sketches are no more than a hand's span. Their largest works are still modest in size, at most 30 inches high by 50 inches wide.
The Hudson River School introduced the star system to American art, and yet few Hudson River stars are represented here. There's nothing by major first generation painters such as Cole, John Frederick Kensett or Thomas Doughty, and nothing by second generation figures such as Frederick Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt.
The Hersens are attracted by modest luminosities. They like quiet views of spectacular scenery and paintings that manage, despite their small size, to suggest vast scale.
They like to champion the overlooked. Although most people can think of no more than a half-dozen names associated with the Hudson River, in fact there were more like 500 to 600 linked to the movement at some point in their careers. It was the first big bandwagon, the first glory train.
As art historian William Kloss noted in the exhibit's eloquent catalog essay, an English critic on a 1838 visit to America wrote home in some bewilderment that the country seemed to her "to swarm with painters."
Probably the most famous painter represented here is Asher Brown Durand with his "View in the Catskill Mountains," 1864, oil on canvas, 13 inches high by 19 inches wide. Lemon light rises over a low-lying bank of clouds, setting off the mossy green trees in the foreground and giving the trio of cows in a clearing the dignity of village elders.
George Henry Smillie's "Afternoon on Lake George" from 1877 (10 inches high by 20 inches wide, oil/canvas), presents the lake on a slow day. Time hangs loosely in the air as pinkish-white clouds in baby blue skies give a pearly-pink sheen to the water.
Richard William Hubbard's "Afternoon at the Lily Pond" from 1863 (13 inches high by 10 inches wide, oil/canvas) is an unblemished paradise for the three children barely visible in its center.
Charles Henry Gifford is a Hersen favorite; there are five oil-on-canvas paintings by him here. "Bar Harbor, Maine" from 1874 (9 inches high by 14 inches wide) brilliantly captures the bleached kind of intensity that water, air and land acquire on a hot summer's day.
Along with the Hersen collection, the Frye has mounted a small but choice selection of its own 19th-century American landscapes. The stars missing from the Hersen collection are here: Winslow Homer, Bierstadt, Ralph Blakelock, Cleveland Rockwell and William Merritt Chase.
Regina Hackett can be reached at 206-448-8332 or e-mail her at reginahackett@seattle-pi.com
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
ART CRITIC
Before that, painters were useful for making portraits of family members and their possessions. Anybody who wanted more went to Europe. Eighteenth-century America was a practical place, populated by those who had more important things to do than contemplate the complexities and refinements of aesthetic objects.
Among tiny gems in the Hudson River exhibit is William McDougal Hart's "Twilight in the Catskills," 1860, oil on panel, 6 1/4-by-5 1/4 inches.
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