Skip to main content
  • Arts & Sciences
  • Washington University in St. Louis

Search form

Home

Department of Art History and Archaeology

Main Menu

  • Home
  • People
  • Undergraduate
  • Graduate
  • Courses
  • Alumni
  • Events
  • News
  • Resources

You are here

Home / Gallery Talk: William L. Coleman

Gallery Talk: William L. Coleman

Dr. William Coleman, Postdoctoral Fellow
April 7, 2016 - 5:00pm
Kemper Art Museum

 

When artists sought to build a market for landscape painting in the nineteenth-century United States, they encountered a major difficulty: the American landscape lacked the grand castles and ruins that had made landscape representation so evocative and popular in many European countries. The artist Thomas Cole described this problem as "the want of associations" in a natural world that seemed all too fresh and wild to European eyes. The solution that Cole proposed was the depiction of ordinary houses—"abodes of plenty"—already rising in the wilderness and inscribing it with democratic virtue in place of the feudal associations of the European landscape. This exhibition presents works by Cole, Asher B. Durand, Edward Hopper, and George Inness, among others, that show the fundamental role the depiction of domesticity continues to play in a vibrant American landscape tradition and the wide variety of approaches artists have taken to this subject matter.
 
This Teaching Gallery exhibition is curated by William L. Coleman, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with his course "'The Hudson River School': Landscape and Ideology," offered in spring 2016.
 

 

Field Trips
General Department Events
  • Contact Us
  • Site Map

Art History and Archaeology | Washington University in St. Louis | One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899 | artarch@wustl.edu