The cherry and tulip poplar Soap Hollow chest by Jeremiah Stahl is carved and painted distinctively. It came to the collection through the Westmoreland Society.
:One woman's vision and the 1949 bequest of her entire estate planted fruitful seeds in this western Pennsylvania town.
The far-seeing benefactor, Mary Marchand Woods, established the Woods Marchand Foundation with the mission of bringing art and education to the people of rural Westmoreland County and nearby Pittsburgh. Ten years later (and 50 years ago this month), Woods' vision was realized when the Westmoreland Museum of American Art opened in new building on the grounds of her girlhood home. The inaugural exhibit was "250 Years of Art in Pennsylvania."
A small museum with a focus on American and regional Pennsylvania art between 1750 and 1950, it quickly built a remarkably rich and diverse collection. The first painting to enter the collection was Rembrandt Peale's "Portrait of George Washington" in 1958.
Later that year, works by Robert Henri, Theodore Robinson, David Gilmour Blythe and George Inness were added. Over the next 20 years, the museum acquired premier works by such masters as Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Benjamin West, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley and Winslow Homer.
Other Pennsylvania artists whose work is represented in the collection include Robert Edge Pine, Robert Street, Thomas Hovenden, William Thompson Russell, Harriet Frishmuth, Austin C. Wooster, Severin Roesen, Edward Willis Redfield
and William Michael Harnett. The collections also include highly desirable Pennsylvania furniture and accessories.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt's 1901 "Mother and Two Children” was a 1971 addition to the museum collection, fleshing out its Pennsylvania artist holdings.
In celebration of its half century, the Westmoreland has launched "Fifty Years Into the Vision," a yearlong gala of exhibits and events showcasing the collections.
It began last November with "Painters of the Scalp Level School Revisited," which was dedicated to the founding director Paul A. Chew for whom those artists were of particular interest. That interest is shared by his successor, Judith H. O'Toole, who has also written and lectured on those artists. The exhibit explored the works of the Nineteenth Century plein air painters who depicted the romantic grandeur of the woodlands and streams of western Pennsylvania.
The Scalp Level School takes its name from the town near Johnstown in Cambria County where the artists went to paint in summer and, like the Barbizon, Hudson River and White Mountain schools, represented a movement away from encroaching industrialization. George M. Hetzel, born in Alsace, was considered the leader of the group that included other artists who had immigrated to the area. They were William Coventry Wall, who was born in England, David Gilmour Blythe, still life painter Alfred Francis King, Martin B. Leisser and John Wesley Beatty. Another was Joseph Woodwell, who studied under Hetzel and Blythe. The exhibition closed in January.
