NEWPORT, RI.- The Newport Art Museum is exhibiting sculptures and paintings by these two remarkable artists and art patrons who met in Newport in 1893 and became close friends and colleagues for the rest of their lives. They were actively involved with the Newport Art Museum, then the Art Association of Newport, during its formative years in the early twentieth century.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney is best known as a visionary art patron and founder of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Yet she also had a significant career as a sculptor, exhibiting throughout the United States and Europe and receiving major commissions and prizes. This is the first exhibition of Whitney’s art since her death in 1942 and her third exhibition at the Newport Art Museum.

“Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney: Sculpture,” organized by Dr. Ellen E. Roberts, the Harold and Anne Berkley Smith curator of American Art at the Norton Museum of Art, showcases rarely seen works from private collections, examining the remarkable variety of the artist’s work—from her earliest classical sculptures to her more symbolic public monuments, from her bleakly Realist depiction of the tragedy of World War I to her late Art Deco pieces. A century after she worked, both the compelling nature of Whitney’s art and her contemporaries’ admiration for it make it time for a reassessment. This exhibition, which includes the Robert Henri portrait (1916) of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, notebooks, and other ephemera will be on view in the Newport Art Museum’s Cushing Building through July 21, 2019.

Howard Cushing’s largest commission for Gertrude Whitney was the 1911-12 mural for the stairway of her Old Westbury Sculpture Studio in New York. This mural was inspired by the symbolist splendors of Diaghilev’s pre-war Ballets Russes set design that Whitney and Cushing knew from France and by the Japanese prints that influenced Whistler’s Peacock Room. The mural culminated in a portrait of Gertrude Whitney herself, in a sorceress costume by Leon Bakst - a white tunic with black cactus flowers, orange trousers, and a plumed hat.

In March 2016 Alexandra Cushing Howard, an architectural historian and granddaughter of Mr. Cushing, invited the team from Julius Lowy Frame and Restoring Company in New York to examine the mural in situ to determine if it would be possible to rescue her grandfather’s hidden masterpiece.

Over the last year, Mr. Cushing’s descendants have acquired the artwork and the Lowy company have successfully lifted the paintings off the wall of the Whitney Studio and beautifully restored the mural, which has been turned into 18 framed panels.

For Lauren Rich, Lowy’s Senior Paintings Conservator, the Cushing project was compelling because it promised to be a challenge, perhaps the greatest challenge of her career to date. She and the Lowy team have revived countless masterpieces, but the resurrection of the Whitney Studio Mural would test her mastery of art history, organic chemistry, restoration, and conservation every step of the way.

After Howard Cushing’s death in 1916, Gertrude Whitney organized a memorial exhibition of his work at Knoedler Gallery in October 1916. In 1919 she headed a committee of William Delano, Lucy Worthington Clews, Charlotte Hunnewell Sorchan, and the sculptor Frederick MacMonnies that commissioned Delano to design in Newport a near replica of her sculpture studio in Westbury; it would be called The Cushing Memorial Gallery, where a group of Howard Cushing’s paintings would be displayed in perpetuity. This building was her first museum.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney orchestrated the inscription above the Cushing Memorial Gallery entrance door on Bellevue Avenue: “This building was erected by the friends of Howard Gardiner Cushing who remember with affection the joy of his companionship and his power to make them see as he saw the beautiful things of life."

The exhibition, “The Beautiful Things in Life,” features two Old Westbury Studio mural panels, iconic portraits of Ida Rubinstein and Howard Gardiner Cushing’s wife and muse, Ethel Cochrane, among other works, and will be on view at the Newport Art Museum through October 6, 2019.

Cushing paintings are held by the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum, the MFA Boston, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Newport Art Museum.