“Small but Sublime: Intimate Views by Durand, Bierstadt and Inness” at the Newark Museum until February 2010.
This exhibition features mostly diminutive oil paintings by artists from the Hudson River School and the Tonalist movements.
“The Newark Museum has a superb collection of modestly sized, beautifully painted landscapes from the second half of the nineteenth century. Presented collectively these works provide a compelling overview of the different approaches to landscape painting while underscoring shifts in artistic and social attitudes towards nature.”
BTW – from Wikipedia:
Tonalism (1880 to 1915) is an artistic style that emerged in the 1880s when American artists began to paint landscape forms with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. Dark, neutral hues, such as gray, brown or blue, would usually dominate such compositions. During the late 1890s American art critics began to use the term “tonal” to describe these works. Two of the leading painters associated with this style are George Inness and James McNeill Whistler.
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. Their paintings depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and the White Mountains.
The Newark Museum, 49 Washington Street, Newark, NJ
Image: “Delaware Valley Before the Storm”, George Inness, 1865 oil on canvas