By
Armand Cabrera
The Civil War and American Art Exhibition which is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC through April 28th, 2013 has collected a number of Hudson River school landscapes, genre paintings with war themes and albumen prints taken during the war itself. The National Portrait Gallery admission is free.
It is a powerful show, and has some of my favorite paintings by Church and Bierstadt as well as paintings by talented artists like Sanford Robinson Gifford, Conrad Wise Chapman, Winslow Homer, Martin Johnson Heade, Eastman Johnson, John Frederick Kensett, and other genre and landscape painters of the period as well as photographers Alexander Gardner, George Bernard Timothy O’Sullivan and John Reekie.
The large paintings are Church’s Cotopaxi 48×85 inches, The Icebergs 64 1/2 × 112 1/2 inches, Aurora Borealis 56 x 83 1/2 inches and Rainy Season in the Tropics 56 1/4 x 84 1/4 inches. Bierstadt’s large Painting Looking Down Yosemite Valley California 1865 64 1/2 x 96 1/2 inches and Thomas Moran’s Slave Hunt in the Dismal Swamp Virginia 34 x 44 inches. These major works are strung throughout the show and many fine medium and small works carrying the bulk of the display.
Here is a Link to the Show where you can click on the thumbnails and see larger images of the works on display but the internet is no substitute for the real experience.
The show Travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York starting May 21st to September 2nd 2013. You can also buy a hard or soft cover catalog for the show.