19th-Century Art Inspired Travel Exhibition at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford

19th-Century Art Inspired Travel

Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran:
Tourism and the American Landscape
January 30 – May 4, 2008
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University

As railroad and steamship companies opened the nation’s previously inaccessible regions to visitors, landscape artists created images that inspired tourists to travel to distant locales like the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, Yosemite, and Yellowstone. Church, Homer, and Moran traveled extensively in the United States in search of picturesque and sublime landscapes to paint. Their works, along with guidebooks and travel-related photographs and novels, helped to familiarize American audiences with the nation’s scenic wonders.

The exhibition, which is organized by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution in New York, includes nearly 130 objects, made up of more than 70 painted oil sketches, studio paintings, and drawings, as well as books, stereographs, railroad brochures, and decorative objects. The exhibition is accompanied by a 200-page illustrated book with essays by the curators of the exhibition and two outside scholars.

For more information on this exhibition, visit http://museum.stanford.edu/news_room/pressrelease_Tourism.html.

The above image is Thomas Moran's "Grand Canyon" chromolithograph from the Arader Galleries collection. If you have any questions about this print, or any other 19th century American West material, please contact Arader Galleries at 415-788-5115

Upcoming Maria Sibylla Merian Exhibition at The Getty Museum

Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters: Women of Art and Science
June 10–August 31, 2008

Maria Sibylla Merian (German, 1647–1717) was a pioneering woman of art, science, and business. She was an accomplished painter of flowers and insects and an entomologist from an early age. In her fifties, she traveled to Suriname, then a Dutch colony in South America, to study extraordinary insects first hand. Working with her two daughters, Merian made and produced one of the greatest illustrated natural history books of all time, The Insects of Surinam. This exhibition introduces Maria Sibylla Merian to American audiences and focuses on natural history illustration, which is one of the most accessible and engaging art forms. Co-organized by the Museum Het Rembrandthuis and the J. Paul Getty Museum, the exhibition travels to Los Angeles after its presentation in Amsterdam and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.

To learn more about the exhibition, visit http://www.getty.edu/visit/exhibitions/future.html

Arader Galleries carries an extraordinary collection of original watercolors and engravings by Maria Sybilla Merian, such as the watercolor transfer print of the papaya pictured above. Please contact us if you would like more information on our collection.