Before the French Revolution, Queen Marie-Antoinette was the chief patron of the woman artist Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun. Her portrait of a young artistocrat is possibly a rendering of Russian Countess Irina Ivanova.
NEW HAVEN, CONN. – “: Homer to Hopper,” an exhibition of 26 works from the Yale University Art Gallery’s wide-ranging and rich collection of American watercolors, will be on view to June 8, in the Matrix Gallery on the third floor.
The works, selected by Helen A. Cooper, the Holcombe T. Green curator of American paintings and sculpture, range from the swiftly noted idea to the color-saturated sheet, from mystical empathy with nature to realistic transcriptions of place.
By the early Nineteenth Century in England the medium of watercolor had developed from a practical means for travelers to record topography to a position almost equal to that of oil painting. The influence of such artists as John Constable and J.M.W. Turner was soon felt in America, where, with the founding of the American Society for Painting in Watercolors in 1866, the standing of watercolor painting was greatly elevated and its popularity increased. Indeed, since the early Twentieth Century, many critics have called watercolor “the American medium,” owing to the imaginative force and brilliant use by some of this country’s finest artists.
Of those artists represented in this exhibition, some, most notably Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, are known equally for their oil and watercolor paintings, and others, such as Maurice Prendergast, Charles Demuth, Charles Burchfield and John Marin, are known primarily as watercolorists.
Visitors will have a rare opportunity to compare Thomas Eakins’ watercolor “John Biglin in a Single Scull” with his oil painting of the same subject in the adjacent American paintings gallery. Other artists represented include Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Walt Kuhn, Thomas Moran, Lionel Feininger, John Haberle and Robert Frederic Blum.
The Yale Art Galleries is on Chapel Street at York.
