SOUTHAMPTON, NY.- Today, the Parrish Art Museum presents 74 remarkable examples of American painting from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, on view in Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art. These distinguished works, which are traveling as a group for the first time, include an array of American art by Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and Edward Hopper, among other notable painters.

Organized and circulated by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., Encouraging American Genius—a phrase borrowed from the Corcoran’s founding mission—opens at The Parrish Art Museum, in Southampton, on June 3, 2006, and remains on view through September 12, 2006. The Parrish is the only venue in the Northeastern United States for this traveling exhibition.

“We are tremendously proud to bring to our audiences these national treasures of American painting, which have engaged art-lovers and scholars for decades,” notes Parrish Director Trudy C. Kramer. “Since its inception, The Parrish has been committed to presenting important works of American art. With this breathtaking exhibition, we look forward to both serving our regular visitors and welcoming new ones.”
Curated by Sarah Cash, Bechhoefer Curator of American Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Encouraging American Genius is 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.

The first section includes celebrations of the New World terrain and its promise. Among the works on view here is Thomas Cole’s elegiac two-part work The Departure and The Return (1837), comprising a pair of canvases depicting morning and evening in imaginary landscapes. They are considered the most beautiful landscapes of Cole’s career. Majestic landscapes also include Frederic Church’s masterpiece Niagara (1857). This sublime portrayal of the great Falls, which had become for many Americans a symbol of the power and vitality of the United States, made Church the most famous artist in the country. Albert Bierstadt’s dramatic, 8-foot-wide Mount Corcoran (ca. 1876–77) not only exemplifies the artist’s skill as a painter, but also his knack for showmanship. He named his fictional mountain range in California after William Corcoran, which proved irresistible to the museum founder, who acquired it for his personal collection.

The second section of the exhibition features figural and landscape works documenting American artists’ varied reactions to—and escapes from—the rapid changes brought by America’s Gilded Age. John Singer Sargent’s Marie Buloz Pailleron (Madame Édouard Pailleron) (1879) was the artist’s first full-length portrait. It depicts the wife of a distinguished playwright, who was also one of Sargent’s patrons, outdoors at her family’s country estate in Savoy. Thomas Eakins’s Singing a Pathetic Song (1881), depicts a woman singing at a musical gathering. It is painted with the artist’s signature combination of meticulous, unflinching realism and aesthetic beauty. The very different Young Girl at a Window (ca. 1883–1885), by Mary Cassatt, demonstrates this artist’s affinity with French Impressionists, with whom she painted and exhibited (including showing this work at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, in 1886). Young Girl at a Window is considered exceptional within Cassatt’s oeuvre because of its rare city scene in the background.

The third and final part of the exhibition includes George Bellows’s Forty-two Kids (1907), a spirited depiction of urban, working-class children on and swimming near a splintered wooden dock in New York City’s East River. The painting—a superb example of Bellows’ characteristic dark background punctured by brightly lit human figures in motion—was painted with vigorous, slashing brushwork that vividly conveys the excitement of the new century. John Sloan’s Yeats at Petipas’ (1910) is a lively portrayal of poets and artists—including Sloan himself—gathered at a bohemian New York City boardinghouse that was famous thanks to the presence of John Butler Yeats, father of the famous Irish poet. Also here is Edward Hopper’s restrained yet powerful depiction of sailing, Ground Swell (1939), which transfers to the sea the sense of isolation and loneliness that the artist usually brought to scenes of urban life.

Other important works on view in Encouraging American Genius include paintings by American masters John Singleton Copley and Joshua Johnson; Barbizon School painter George Inness; trompe-l’oeil master William Michael Harnett; and such modernists as Maurice Prendergast, Thomas Hart Benton, and Aaron Douglas.