‘In Nature’s Studio’ showcases American landscape painting at Mennello Museum
Visitors to the Mennello Museum of American Art can find themselves transported to faraway majestic vistas and into bucolic landscapes of yesteryear, all without leaving Orlando.
“In Nature’s Studio,” the museum’s latest exhibition, showcases more than 50 American landscape paintings from the early 19th Century through the 20th Century. On loan from the Reading Public Museum, the exhibit is on display through Jan. 15, 2024.
“This exhibit begins in the Hudson River School of artists and goes up through tonalism and impressionism in the United States,” said Katherine Page, the museum’s curator of art and education. “This was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, so the artists are responding to how the cityscape is changing and how much nostalgia they have for the untouched landscape.”
Water is a focal point in many scenes, often instilled with silky smooth textures and soft light. During this time, paintings were created slowly and methodically, predating the quick, spontaneous movement of impressionism.
Painters were exploring their craft while America was trying to cement its status as a newly independent country.
“America was young, and there was a slight inferiority complex among its artists. A lot of these artists went to Europe and trained,” said Shannon Fitzgerald, the museum’s executive director. “I think these artists were our first conservationists. They were really trying to build this confidence and take a stand, a young nation creating its identity.”
The paintings are often encased in ornate frames and show signs of age with cracking oil paints, which suggests how historical and timeless these pieces are. In the Mennello exhibition, they’re grouped mostly by themes and seasons.
A landscape painted by John Heyl Raser in the 1870s shows the Schuylkill River south of Reading, Pennsylvania, and signs of industrial civilization dotting the horizon with trains, farms, roads and dams.
Other nearby landscapes are instilled with soft, glowing light, showcasing the styles of luminist painters.
“This is a very precise way of working with skyscapes. You have the sun kind of glowing through the trees and no instance of brushwork or anything like that. It’s precise and even,” Page said. “These are romantic landscapes.”
While these painters worked in their time to capture an American landscape they feared might be developed, they left behind beautiful artifacts that find themselves at the intersection of art and natural history.
If you go: “In Nature’s Studio” is on display through Jan. 15, 2024, at 900 E. Princeton St. in Orlando. The museum is open 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon-4:30 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 per adult, $4 per senior ages 60 and older and $1 per student with valid ID or child ages 6-17 (those younger than age 6 are free). Active, retired military, veterans and their families enter for free. For more information, visit mennellomuseum.org.
Find me @PConnPie on Instagram or send me an email: pconnolly@orlandosentinel.com.
