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