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Indepth Arts News:
"The Virginia Landscape"
2000-07-13 until 2000-11-12
Virginia Historical Society
Richmond, VA,
USA United States of America
Thomas Jefferson once boasted to a friend in England, Our own country . . . is made on an improved plan. Europe is a first idea, a
crude production, before the [M]aker knew his trade. He was talking about the landscape of Virginia, and an exhibition opening July
13, 2000, at the Virginia Historical Society may provide compelling evidence to support his notion. The Virginia Landscape, the
largest assembly of Virginia landscape images ever exhibited, illustrates the importance of the landscape in shaping the commonwealth
and creating its identity.
More than 240 landscape paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs, dating from the colonial period to the
present, reveal much about Virginia's natural history and the attitudes of its citizens. Initially, the commonwealth was best known for its
natural landmarks like the Dismal Swamp, the Peaks of Otter, and Natural Bridge. Visitors traveled great distances even across oceans--
just to see these wonders. With the fame of such historic landmarks as Mount Vernon, Monticello, Jamestown, and Yorktown, Virginia
soon became known also as a place where significant American history unfolded. Artists painted these sites as a way to remember
history. Other canvases illustrate the effect of twentieth-century patterns of growth on the natural environment. Never before has such
a body of work been displayed or critically examined, remarks Charles F. Bryan, Jr., director of the Virginia Historical Society.
The Virginia Landscape is about the land and the cultural and historic changes that have occurred in the commonwealth during the
last four centuries. It traces the rural settlement of the colony and state along the models of the plantation and market town, and
examines the meaning of progress in Virginia by following the visual record of urban growth and the construction of canals and
railroads. It surveys Virginia's Civil War landscape, which in 1864 inspired Walt Whitman's interest: Dilapidated, fenceless, and
trodden with war as Virginia is, wherever I move across her surface, I find myself rous'd to surprise and admiration. What capacity for
production, improvements, human life, nourishment and expansion. The exhibit follows the path of landscape imagery to the end of
the twentieth century, when a tradition of nature painting finally was established in the state, in defiance of environmental threats to the
land.
Scattered throughout this multi-gallery landmark exhibit are works by well-known figures such as Albert Bierstadt, George Inness,
David Johnson, Rockwell Kent, Gari Melchers, Charles Sheeler, William Louis Sonntag, Wayne Thiebaud, Alfred Wordsworth
Thompson, and Worthington Whittredge, as well as a number of lesser known but highly competent artists like Edward Beyer, Alexis
Fournier, and Theresa Pollack. The Virginia Landscape, on view through November 12, 2000, is underwritten by generous grants
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Robins Foundation, and the Virginia
Commission for the Arts.
The Virginia Landscape: A Cultural History, the 224-page exhibition catalog containing hundreds of color images of the landscape
paintings, is co-authored by the exhibition co-curators Dr. James C. Kelly and Dr. William M. S. Rasmussen. The catalog will be
available in the Museum Shop as of July 12, 2000.
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