WASHINGTON, D.C. - Continuing its practice of organizing exhibitions that explore the meaning of American artworks in their own time and in the context of our culture, the National Museum of American Art (NMAA) is offering the year's most ambitious show in its field, "Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory."

Containing nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs and decorative objects, it reflects ways in which, between 1865 and 1945, artists of the region hearkened back to the past and embodied ideals and values for all Americans during times of national turbulence and change.

Organized by NMAA senior curator William H. Truettner and University of Virginia professor emeritus Roger B. Stein, the exhibition will be on view until August 22. It will not travel.

The fully illustrated, 240-page exhibition catalogue contains a preface by NMAA director Elizabeth Broun, a helpful introduction by regional historians Dona Brown and Stephen Nissenbaum, and meaty chapters by Truettner and Stein; Thomas A. Denenberg, curator of American decorative arts at the Wadsworth Athenaeum; and Bruce Robertson, art historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Published by Yale University Press, it sells for $45 hardcover and $32.50 softcover.

Overall, the exhibition examines how, at a time when New England was undergoing intense urbanization, industrialization and modernization in the wake of the Civil War, artists continued to depict it as a never-changing place of sturdy traditions, high-minded people with values and unspoiled beauty - an identity firmly rooted in its historic past.

This thesis is documented in six thematic sections, with considerable overlap: "After the War: Constructing a Rural Past"; "Gilded Age Pilgrims"; "The Discreet Charm of the Colonial"; "Small-Town America"; "Perils of the Sea"; and "Yankee Modernism."

The images and crafted objects on view effectively demonstrate the organizers' contention that, beyond the historical events and romantic aspirations of the young nation, it was the work of these artists that made old New England the moral and spiritual homeland of the nation. New England's values became America's values.

"After the War: Constructing a Rural Past" features much-loved scenes of a history-filled, pastoral New England that became the staple of numerous accomplished artists after the Civil War. Farm, village and coastal views, literary illustrations and historical subjects offered post-bellum audiences a reassuring look backward and a reaffirmation of the bedrock traditions of the founding fathers. Printmakers, photographers and sculptors carried these themes into the broader currency of popular culture.

Maine native Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), who became a prominent New York portraitist and summer resident of Nantucket Island, created depictions of an innocent, rural New England that recalled bygone days, whether maple sugar gathering in Maine or corn-husking bees and cranberry harvesting on Nantucket.

John Rogers (1829-1904) was a native of Salem, Mass., who later sculpted in New Canaan, Conn., where his studio is preserved by the New Canaan Historical Society. He specialized in inexpensive, widely marketed plaster statuary groups that carried images of old New England into homes all over America. Whether depicting a fugitive slave mother and her baby meeting with the region's leading abolitionists, or showing a farmer besting a city slicker in checkers, or recalling Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Rogers's statuettes embodied Yankee verities of yesteryear.

Other artists like William Stanley Haseltine, Winslow Homer and George Inness created idyllic views of charming villages, genteel tourists traversing New Hampshire's White Mountains, and epic canvases immortalizing the crashing waves on the region's rocky coasts.

Traveling to North Conway, N.H., in the mid-1870s, Inness (1825-1894) created a dramatic landscape, "Kearsarge Village" (1875), which shows the "scenic rural" in the White Mountains in a panoramic view under threatening skies. These images, celebrating the region's unspoiled beauty and grandeur, served to remind the nation of New England's special scenic charms.

These and other paintings were created in a post-bellum period in which a new New England was actually emerging, shaped by an exodus from farms to cities, smoky factories and a diverse ethnic population fed by increasing immigration. Nevertheless, aided by these artistic messages, in the imagination of Americans experiencing wrenching political and social changes, New England became a touchstone for the past, offering a kind of comforting spiritual homeland untouched by progress. "People looked," says Truettner, "for a stable past from which to bring values forward."

In the wake of the devastation and carnage of the Civil War and in the midst of the traumas prompted by immigration, over-crowded cities and expanding industrial plants, writers and artists of New England reexamined the region's past, suggesting that the moral and social values of the Puritans and pilgrims, the establishment of the country via Revolution, and the preservation of the Union and freeing of slaves through war set good examples for the entire nation. These efforts solidified "New England's claim to moral predominance and national leadership, and... reinforced the searching for historical roots," according to Stein.

Works in the section on "Gilded Age Pilgrims" show how the fortitude and piety of pilgrims and Puritans were memorialized by a variety of painters. Fine examples in the exhibition by such lesser-known artists as George Henry Boughton, Charles Yardley Turner, Henry Mosler and Jennie A. Brownscombe helped guide the way Americans viewed their past.

A revival of interest in the heroes and lessons of the American Revolution, given a significant boost by Centennial celebrations of 1876, was imbued with visual meaning by painters and sculptors after the Civil War. Artists like Howard Pyle (1853-1911), with his vivid depiction of redcoats advancing in "The Battle of Bunker Hill" (1898), and N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), with his dramatic view of militant Yankee farmers blocking the British path in "At Concord Bridge" (1921-23), paid homage to the American participants and reinforced New England's reputation as the birthplace of the nation's fortitude and democratic values.

New Englander Childe Hassam (1859-1935), who studied in Europe and settled in New York, rarely passed up an opportunity to glorify the heritage and beauty of his native region. His pastel, "Colonial Graveyard at Lexington" (n.d.) evoked memories of sturdy forebears who fought for and founded the nation.

American sculptors, working with meticulous realism and admiration for their subjects, provided three-dimensional reminders of the seminal role Yankees played in shaping the nation's destiny. Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) in his forceful bronze sculpture "The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin)" (1887) depicted the intrepid founder of Springfield, Mass., and Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) in his heroic "Concord Minute Man of 1775" (1889) memorializing those who stood their ground "by the rude bridge that arched the flood" (in Ralph Waldo Emerson's immortal words), offered vivid connections to America's forefathers and their quest for liberty and equality.

Formal portraits of Boston's upper-crust elite by leading painters of the era reinforced the continuity among these latter-day pilgrim families, a point underscored by their resemblance to Colonial likenesses by John Singleton Copley that still hung in Beacon Hill drawing rooms. In other Brahmin portraits, "Tradition is closely inscribed in the dress and demeanor of the sitters, as well as in obvious tributes to art-historical precedent," notes co-curator Stein.

Meanwhile, the revered New England poet Longfellow, whose much-acclaimed "The Courtship of Miles Standish," recreation of Paul Revere's ride and other verses had done so much to romanticize the Colonial period, was immortalized in innumerable white-bearded portraits and his home in Boston was preserved for posterity. The Longfellow National Historic Site is maintained by the National Park Service, while his birthplace in Portland, Me., is operated by the Maine Historical Society.

Saint-Gaudens's great "Shaw Memorial," unveiled in Boston Common in 1897, paid tribute to the martyrdom of the white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and the heroism of the black troops of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment who died in the assault on Fort Wagner, S.C., in the Civil War. The grand memorial was, in Stein's words, "the result of a long series of negotiations in New England over how to give shape and form to the black presence in Massachusetts culture."

Significantly, in addition to vintage photographs of the dedication of the "Shaw Memorial," on view is the amazingly accomplished marble bust of Shaw sculpted by 23-year-old Edmonia Lewis (1845-1911?) in 1867. Created at a time when she had little formal training, reproductions of Lewis' small likeness sold so well in absolutionist-hotbed Boston that the proceeds enabled her to travel to Rome, where she established herself as America's first professional African-American sculptor.

"The Discreet Charm of the Colonial" section documents with artwork and decorative objects how, by the turn of the century, wealthy Americans increasingly spent their summers at New England retreats, often joined by Impressionist painters who formed artists' colonies in picturesque inland and coastal communities. Tourists also flocked to towns and villages caught up in the Colonial Revival movement. "The past, carefully set on small stages - towns like Deerfield, Mass., and Old Lyme, Conn., and an occasional Boston drawing room - was constructed almost exclusively from old or newly made Colonial artifacts, both thought to embody the aims and ideals of old-stock New Englanders," Truettner and Stein observe.

Works like "Captain Lord House, Kennebunkport, Maine" (circa 1920) by Lowell native Willard L. Metcalf (1858-1925) and Hassam's "Church at Old Lyme, Connecticut" (1905) depicted the pasts of small New England towns in sunny, softly brushed colors that distanced them from the realities of the early Twentieth Century.

Hassam created some of his most memorable pictures during summers at a resort hotel on the Isles of Shoals off the Maine-New Hampshire coast, such as "The Garden in its Glory" (1892) and "The South Ledges, Appledore" (1913). He executed similarly warm, tranquil canvases while summering at other scenic regional sites like Old Lyme.

"The past is a living presence in Hassam's art," observes Denenberg, the exhibition coordinator who is now at the Wadsworth Athenaeum. "While his village scenes may appear quaint, they are also active statements about the importance of traditional New England values and institutions in an era of great change."

Tourists were also encouraged to visit restful inland locations, such as historic old Deerfield, which painters and photographers portrayed as though it had been frozen in time. To some extent, it had. Craft organizations were formed to turn out needlework, woven baskets and handmade furniture as a means to profit from the town's past. Preservation of Deerfield's venerable structures helped maintain the look of a Seventeenth Century frontier outpost, attracting many visitors by the early 1900s.

Artists' colonies thrived in places such as Old Lyme, where Florence Griswold's hospitality and mansion welcomed Hassam and a veritable who's who of American Impressionists. In Cornish, N.H., sculptor Saint-Gaudens and painter Thomas W. Dewing helped attract a large summer community of artists and writers, who reveled in the pastoral setting and glorious mountain views.

Benson, who came from history-steeped Salem and taught at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School, established a personal summer retreat on North Haven Island, in midcoast Maine. He excelled at depicting his wife and daughters, invariably in billowing white dresses, bathed in sunshine and enjoying their idyllic seaside setting, as in "Summer" (1909).

These idealized images of New England scenery and living were exploited by railroads and tourism promoters, who attracted throngs of summer visitors eager to soak up the "discreet charm of the Colonial."

A fascinating figure in the region's historic revival movement was minister-turned-entrepreneur Wallace Nutting (1861-1941), described by Truettner and Denenberg as the "most active proselytizer for Colonial New England." Nutting maintained a series of historic-house museums, marketed hand-tinted photographs and sold reproduced furniture and artifacts that promoted widespread interest in things Colonial and appealed to a wide buying public.

Nutting's aggressive marketing of a "newly fabricated version of the past," Truettner and Denenberg say, "had the virtue of bringing the Colonial within reach of the everyday consumer" and had an even greater impact than those promoting collection of the "real" past. Thus, reproductions, even more than originals, conveyed lessons about history and the ideals and values of America's past.

All these paintings, photographs and recreations of decorative Colonial objects, Truettner and Denenberg conclude, "represented the New England worth preserving - in contrast to a present that lacked grace, style, and an established social order." Between 1865 and 1945, observed Denenberg, the region "became an ancient memory-bank."

Although earlier artists had celebrated small-town life in New England, the genre kicked into high gear in the 1930s, with the onset of the Depression and a concomitant search for a place - real or imagined - untouched by a malfunctioning economic and social system. Focusing on the joys, serenity and sense of community of everyday rural life, especially in Northern New England, popular artists like Anna Marie Robertson ("Grandma") Moses, Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish offered an escape from troubled times.

While Vermont-based Parrish (1870-1966), the enormously popular illustrator-turned-landscape painter, created idealized evocations of the verdant and tranquil New England countryside such as "June Skies (A Perfect Day)" (1940), Grandma Moses, who actually lived just across the Vermont border in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., gained late-in-life fame with her enduringly charming and naive views of an inviting, homespun rural world, like "Green Mountains" (1946).

Rockwell (1894-1978), who created unforgettable covers for the Saturday Evening Post for nearly a half century, often used his neighbors in tiny Arlington, Vt., as models. His famous "Freedom of Speech" (1943), triggered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 Four Freedoms address, and based on town meetings in his home village, offered an idealized version of that time-honored small-town tradition.

So pervasive and persuasive were Rockwell's images that, to this day, picture-postcard New England hamlets are routinely called "Norman Rockwell towns."

One of the more interesting paintings in the "Small-Town America" section is "Beaver Meadow" (1939) by Paul Sample (1896-1974), then artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College. In this somewhat enigmatic view of a rural regional scene, the artist linked the past and present in a canvas that Truettner calls "an Eden fallen on modern times." Its unique vantage point, soft contours and inherently discordant notes owe much to the work of Midwestern regionalist titan Thomas Hart Benton.

Meanwhile, photographers such as Louise Rosskam and Paul Strand recorded regional villages in images that were both homey and stark. They reinforced New England's reputation for self-sufficiency, independence, family and community spirit.

Other Depression-era photographers, many employed by the Farm Security Administration, told different stories, depicting the back-breaking labor required to glean crops from rocky New England soil, and views of automobiles and other signs of "progress" impinging on picturesque small towns. Photographs in the show by Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott and others exposed the realities of a region undergoing change in hard times.

By the mid-1930s, worsening economic conditions prompted determined efforts to attract tourists to New England by touting the region's history, charming communities and healthy outdoor recreational activities. Photographs and chic posters, like "New Hampshire" (circa 1940) encouraged the growth of skiing, especially in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Helping to lay the groundwork for this promotional campaign was the popularity of snowscapes by painters like Aldro T. Hibbard (1886-1972), whose lovely "Covered Bridge in Vermont, Road to Londonderry" (circa 1920) featured glistening snow, a horse-drawn logging sleigh, venerable houses and a covered bridge.

Northern New England was not alone, of course, in being hyped as an imaginary retreat in hard times. Paintings by Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood celebrated the virtues of the solid Midwest, and many artists felt the natural depictions of New England "were thought to have a special virtue, born of the region's long-standing reputation for independence and self-sufficiency," according to Truettner and Stein. Thus, the region's artists and promotional campaigns helped New England get through the economic distress of the '30s and '40s.

The section entitled "Perils of the Sea" concentrates on the harsh life of fisherfolk and others along New England's lengthy coastline, offering stark contrasts to the bright, inviting depictions of resort areas by Benson, Hassam and others.

Needless to say, this theme is forcefully represented by works of the great Winslow Homer (1836-1910), whose latest and greatest canvases, painted at rock-bound Prout's Neck, Me., immortalized rugged mariners and the clash between waves and land along the New England coast. Homer also celebrated the fishing people and their families, whom he came to know, as they struggled to make a living from the often dangerous ocean. His stark interpretations of the seacoast had a great impact on Robert Henri and his followers, several of whom spent summers early in the Twentieth Century on rocky Monhegan Island in midcoast Maine.

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) lived year-round on Monhegan early in his career, working at odd jobs and showing the isolated island in all seasons, including its harsh winters. A dedicated Socialist who felt great kinship with working people, he conveyed the hardships and perils of fishermen's lives.

Other major painters captivated by Monhegan's towering cliffs, churning seas and cathedral-like woods included George Bellows and Edward Hopper, who did some of the finest early works of their careers on the island.

Famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth, who summered in nearby Port Clyde, created his best easel paintings in Maine, depicting the rugged coastline, fishermen's families and fishermen at work. "Island Funeral" (1939) offers a bird's-eye view of a community gathering to say farewell to one of their own, a reminder that death and tragedy were inevitable realities among Wyeth's fisherfolk neighbors. This luminous work, normally hard to see in a dining room of the Hotel duPont in Wilmington, Del., is a highlight of the exhibition, underscoring the great illustrator's underappreciated achievements as a serious painter.

A few other painters, notably Charles Hawthorne in his portrayals of Portuguese fishermen and their families around Gloucester, showed those who earned their living at sea. Other artists depicted shipbuilding along the New England coast, most impressively Bellows (1882-1915) in Camden, Me., with "The Rope" (1916).

Carroll Thayer Berry (1886-1978), an underappreciated Maine printmaker and painter, celebrated the past and present in "Bath Iron Works, World War II" (1941), in which large ironclad warships under repair or construction at that well-known facility loom over a small wooden boat.

Some artists depicted the region's declining whaling/fishing industry in optimistic terms, while others created romanticized images of old salts amidst picturesque maritime settings, which were used to attract tourists to pageants and summertime activities. They helped sell New England as an evocative, bracing vacation destination.

The concluding section, "Yankee Modernism," displays ways in which avant-garde artists applied new styles, compositional ideas and color strategies to themes made familiar by artists in the decades since the Civil War. Mostly based in Manhattan, Modernist artists sought to escape the city's heat via summer sojourns in art colonies such as Provincetown on Cape Cod, Gloucester on Cape Ann and Ogunquit, Monhegan and Mount Desert in Maine. A few independent souls went their own way, both inland and to less fashionable spots along the coast.

Rather than overtly dwelling on the region's historic past, Yankee Modernists built on the values and scenery that made New England special. "Their view of the region appears to be rather genteel," writes Robinson in the catalogue, "favoring landscapes and beach scenes or, at its most rigorous, gently realist, with a few scenes of bucolic farms and hardy fisherfolk."

Stuart Davis (1892-1964), who was drawn to Gloucester because of its old-fashioned, un-modern look, applied his idiosyncratic brand of modernism to vivid works such as "Landscape with Garage Lights" (1932), in which contemporary gas pumps are juxtaposed against a backdrop of fishing boats in the old port. "Dominating this New England landscape," Robertson observes, "are not schooners and spires, but the `jazz' of gas pumps and electric lights." This color-filled canvas, commingling old and new elements of Gloucester, is one of the most striking in a show loaded with memorable images.

A few Modernists, including Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, along with Hopper, focused on the architecture of the region - churches, houses and even factories - in views that retained a precise New England character. Even decaying factory towns, whose industries were in decline by the 1930s, appeared crisp and pristine in the eyes of these avant-garde painters.

A quite different reaction to Yankee land was offered by Japanese-born Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953). Summering with fellow avant-gardists in seaside Ogunquit, he reveled in depicting giant women paddling in coastal waters, as in "The Swimmer" (circa 1924) or boldly smoking cigarettes. This is a New England not quite as bound to its past.

Modernist John Marin (1870-1953) gradually worked his way up the Maine coast, from one summer residence to another, creating a large number of watercolors in which he employed a cubist vocabulary to depict the islands, fir trees, sailing vessels, sea and mountains he so loved. They reflected his view of the Pine Tree State as "one fierce, relentless, cruel, beautiful, fascinating, hellish, and all the other ish-es place."

It was left to native son Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), who painted in the Southwest, Mexico and Europe before returning to Maine in the late 1930s - determined to be "the painter of Maine" - to best capture the strength, monumentality and enduring qualities of the Pine Tree State. His feel for his subjects shines through in the culminating works of this career, whether depicting a single crashing wave, the majesty of the state's highest peak in "Mount Katahdin, Maine" (1942), stark white village churches, or that staple of Maine lore, the lobster.

This impressive display of New England art, both familiar works by big names and striking images by lesser-knowns, provides much food for thought, as well as treats for the eye. However much painters, sculptors, photographers and craftsmen may have ignored - or artfully rearranged - reality, the images they created remain among the most beloved in American art. Fortuitously, they also spurred historic preservation, environmental conservation and tourist movements in the region - shaping and maintaining the New England of their own invention.

The imagery of the region, which has so influenced the nation's perception of New England, continues to this day to challenge and excite artists and viewers. As Robertson concludes, "Even as the region thrives anew, so too have entrepreneurs and artists found new ways to make the `Mayflower' return again, to make old New England fresh again."

Those who can make it to Washington before the exhibition closes on August 22 will be amply rewarded. All who acquire the exhibition catalogue, crammed with reproductions and informative essays, will treasure and consult it for a long time to come.

The National Museum of American Art is at Eighth and G Streets NW in Washington; telephone 202/357-2700. Museum hours are 10 am to 5 pm daily.