Exhibition
New Eyes
American Landscape Drawings
Landscape (Path with Two Figures) (detail), c. 1881 - 1883, Edward Mitchell Bannister (American, born Canada, 1828 - 1901), 2025-44-1
When
Ongoing
Where
Main Building, Korman Galleries 221-223
About
Depicting the landscape has been an enduring and definitive vocation for American artists. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal 1836 essay, "Nature," the philosopher and poet announced the birth of a distinctive American artistic spirit rooted in its natural surroundings. “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts,” he wrote, “[s]o shall we come to look at the world with new eyes.”
To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, the exhibition "New Eyes: American Landscape Drawings" speaks to the broad artistic, cultural, and spiritual pursuit of looking “at the world with new eyes” between the years of 1840 and 1940. The wide range of subjects and styles of these works reveals the diversity of both the American terrain and the responses it inspired among artists of varied cultural backgrounds and visual traditions.
Presenting rarely seen watercolors and drawings from the museum’s works on paper collection, "New Eyes" reflects on the vital energies that drew artists outdoors to register fleeting impressions of the American landscape.
Curators
Em Dombrovskaya, Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow
Laurel Garber, Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings
Heather Hughes, Kathy and Ted Fernberger Associate Curator of Prints
Nora Rosengarten, Dorothy del Bueno Curatorial Fellow
Image Gallery
Landscape (Path with Two Figures), c. 1881 - 1883, Edward Mitchell Bannister (American, born Canada, 1828 - 1901), 2025-44-1
Dublin Lake, 1921, John Singer Sargent, American (active London, Florence, and Paris), 1856 – 1925, 2025-46-7
Bow Spirit, c. 1916-1918, Alice Schille (American, 1869 – 1955), 2017-90-1