Museum Open

After a two-year hiatus, the art collection formed by Luman Reed, one of New York's pioneering 19th-century collectors, reclaimed its pride of place in the picture galleries on the second floor, just off Dexter Hall from March 2004 through April 2005. Thomas Cole's "The Course of Empire" and other works by the founder of the Hudson River School took center stage, along side seminal paintings by Asher Brown Durand, William Sidney Mount and George Whiting Flagg. Luman Reed's collection occupies a special place in the development of American art; in the history of taste, collecting, and patronage; as well as in the history of New York and the New-York Historical Society. The donation of the collection in 1858, together with the holdings of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, transformed the Historical Society into New York City's premiere art museum in an era before the establishment of such museum giants as the Metropolitan and the Whitney. In addition to featuring Reed's collection, the exhibition also explored the history of New York art collecting in the nineteenth century, highlighting other important art patrons, including Thomas Jefferson Bryan and Robert L. Stuart, whose collections augment the painting holdings of the Historical Society.

Making American Taste features fifty-five works from the New-York Historical Society’s collection that cast new light on both the history of American art and the formation of American cultural ideals during a crucial period from the 1830s to the late 1860s. By integrating history, literary and religious subjects with now better-known examples of rural and domestic genre, the exhibition explores the broad range of styles and narrative themes that appealed to nineteenth-century Americans seeking cultural refinement.

Click on the painting below to learn about the people depicted.

Please note the closing date has been changed from February 21
After a national tour, the forty-five iconic works, including Thomas Cole’s five-part series The Course of Empire and other masterworks by Cole, John F. Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper F. Cropsey, Asher B. Durand and others will once again be on display at the New-York Historical Society. This exhibition showcases the extraordinary depth and richness of the New-York Historical Society’s landscape collections, especially paintings by artists of the Hudson River School. Rising to eminence in New York during the mid-nineteenth century, this loosely knit group of artists, together with like-minded poets and writers, forged a self-consciously “American” landscape vision and literary voice. Both were grounded in the exploration of the natural world as a resource for spiritual renewal and as an expression of cultural and national identity. 

 
Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy provides a new perspective on American art by approaching narrative subject matter through the lens of taste as it was defined roughly from 1825 to 1870, when debates over the role of American art addressed not just content, but the role art should take outside of the European tradition. By integrating history, literary and religious subjects with now better-known examples of rural and domestic genre, this exhibition introduces to modern audiences the broad range of styles and narrative themes which appealed to nineteenth-century Americans seeking cultural refinement.
 

Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River School features forty-five iconic works including Thomas Cole’s five-part series: The Course of Empire and other masterworks by Cole, John F. Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper F. Cropsey, Asher B. Durand and many others.

Drawn from the treasures of the New-York Historical Society’s permanent collection, Hudson River Masterpieces showcases nineteenth-century landscape paintings by the artists of the Hudson River School. The exhibition includes celebrated works by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, founders of the American landscape school. Other featured artists include: John Frederick Kensett, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Francis Augustus Silva, Sanford Robinson Gifford, John W. Casilear, Jervis McEntee, William T. Richards and William L. Sonntag.

 
The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand, featuring over 100 works including paintings, drawings, engravings, and daguerreotypes, recreates Durand’s milieu by displaying his own works in the context of those by, or portraying, his circle of fellow artists, writers, and patrons. Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886) was one of the most important American artists of the 19th century. He was a central figure as an artist, as a founder of art institutions, and as the acknowledged leader of the American landscape school from his election as president of the National Academy of Design in 1845 until his death at the age of 90. Durand’s six-decade career began with the earliest efforts of the American artists, writers and patrons to construct a national cultural identity. Durand participated from the very beginning: first as a master banknote and reproductive engraver; then as a portrait painter recording the features of founding fathers as well as the mercantile and cultural elite of antebellum New York before turning to landscape painting.