NEW BRITAIN, CONN.- The New Britain Museum of American Art presents the exhibition Masterpieces of The Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Collection, opening on July 8.

The New Britain Museum of American Art’s forthcoming exhibition highlights works by the most renowned artists from The Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Collection. Consisting of over 80 works by approximately 70 artists, this presentation represents a small yet exceptional portion of the Museum’s nearly 1,800-piece Low Illustration Collection. The Museum’s first director, Sanford B.D. Low, was an advocate for illustration who led the New Britain Museum of American Art to become one of the first institutions to recognize illustration as a fine art rather than merely an instrument of commerce. American illustration has grown in popularity throughout the decades due to its typically nostalgic subject matter, displayed in works such as John Falter’s Boys and Kites (1950) and Stevan Dohanos’s Fourth of July Parade (1947), which influenced pop culture during some of the most significant cultural transformations of the early twentieth century. This exhibition will also include an introductory historical overview of Sanford B.D. Low’s contributions to the New Britain Museum of American Art, as well as the founding of The Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Committee and establishment of the Low Illustration Collection. The Museum’s Low Illustration Collection continues to flourish by way of the Committee, led by Trustee Emeritus Lindsley Wellman.

Providing a veritable history of American illustration, the exhibition spotlights works by groundbreaking artists such as Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and many others. These artists skillfully captured American values in story, advertisement, and cover illustrations for publications such as Scribner’s Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Other works demonstrate a fantastical narrative, depicting primitive or romanticized scenes, such as those by Pyle. These themes also prevail in several works from the Museum’s Robert Lesser Collection of Pulp Art, that represent images of crime, drama, and science fiction, that were created for popular novels and stories from the late 1800s through the 1950s.