Rarely has the exceptional collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art traveled outside of its home in Washington, D.C. The Corcoran opened its doors in 1869 as the first art museum in the United States capital. Today, the Corcoran features a collection of exceptional quality, depth and breadth featuring numerous icons in the history of American art. Making only one stop east of the Mississippi, “Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art” will be on view October 7–December 31 at the Mint Museum of Art.
“Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art” focuses on a wide range of works spanning from the late Eighteenth Century American colonial era through the first half of the Twentieth Century and will feature 74 works from the Corcoran’s permanent collection. This visually stunning exhibition will be organized around the Corcoran’s three areas of greatest strength in American painting: Hudson River School landscapes, canvases from the Gilded Age and early Twentieth Century Realism.
Hudson River School works will be celebrations of the New World Terrain such as Thomas Cole’s famous cycle “Departure” and “Return,” 1837, Frederic Church’s majestic “Niagara,” 1857, and Albert Bierstadt’s operatic “Mount Corcoran,” circa 1876–77. The rapid changes wrought by America’s Gilded Age will feature John Singer Sargent’s “Madame Pailleron,” 1897, and Thomas Eakins’ “Singing a Pathetic Song,” 1881.
Portraying the pulsating energy and change of the Twentieth Century will be engaging realist works like George Bellow’s “Forty-two Kids,” 1907, John Sloan’s “Yeats at Petitpas,” 1910, and Edward Hopper’s “Ground Swell,” 1939.
Well-known examples by early masters like John Singleton Copley and Joshua Johnson will introduce the exhibition. Striking compositions such as those by modernist greats Maurice Prendergast, Thomas Hart Benton and Aaron Douglas, late Nineteenth Century works by trompe l’oeil master William Michael Hernett, realist Richard Norris Brooke and American Barbizon painter George Inness, among others, will round out this veritable walk through American history and culture.
The Mint Museum of Art is at 2730 Randolph Road. For information, 704-337-2000 or www.mintmuseum.org.
