On a beautiful Saturday members of the "Woodlot Lane Painting Colony" met in Hartford at the Wadsworth Atheneum to view the exhibition entitles Frederic Church: A Painter's Pilgrimage. Originally, I was less the excited because I often feel that the large landscapes done by the Hudson Valley School are too dark with a color palette of very deep green and browns. However, many of the painting on exhibitions were from Church's visit to the Middle East so there was also bright reflected sun.
Here is how the Atheneum website describes the exhibition:
"Frederic Church: A Painter’s Pilgrimage is the first exhibition to bring together Church’s highly detailed compositions of sacred terrain in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. A leading painter of 19th-century America and the Hudson River School, Frederic Church (1826–1900) was born in Hartford, Connecticut and had deep ties to the Wadsworth Atheneum, which maintains significant holdings of his early landscapes. The museum’s founder, Daniel Wadsworth, arranged for Church’s apprenticeship with painter Thomas Cole, the father of the Hudson River School.
From the mid-1850s until the early 1870s, Church was the most popular, most written about, and the most financially successful painter in the United States. A specialist in landscape, he traveled to remote places to sketch majestic scenes unfamiliar to his American audience that he could turn into dramatic, large-scale paintings. Frederic Church: A Painter’s Pilgrimage explores an artist’s journey to the other side of the world—not only to paint historical and biblical sites, but to also discover his faith and broaden his worldview."
Along side the large oil landscapes there were also some very handsome sketches.
I wish this picture cam out better as it is one of my favorites. I suspect I like it so much because of the colors.
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