J. Alden Weir

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft and is part of the... Smithsonian Institution. It was conceived as the United States' museum of contemporary and modern art and currently focuses its collection-building and exhibition-planning mainly on the post–World War II period, with particular emphasis on art made during the last 50 years. Notable artists in the collection include: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, John Chamberlain, Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Milton Avery, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, Arshile Gorky, Edward Hopper, Larry Rivers, and Raphael Soyer among others. Outside the museum is a sculpture garden, featuring works by artists including Auguste Rodin, David Smith, Alexander Calder, Jeff Koons and others.
more

The Phillips Collection is an art museum founded by Duncan Phillips in 1921 as the Phillips Memorial Gallery located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Phillips was the grandson of James H. Laughlin, a banker and co-founder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Among the... artists represented in the collection are Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Courbet, El Greco, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Arthur Dove, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, Jacob Lawrence, Augustus Vincent Tack, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Mark Rothko. Duncan Phillips played a seminal role in introducing America to modern art. Born in Pittsburgh—the grandson of James Laughlin, a banker and co-founder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company — Phillips and his family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1895. He, along with his mother, established The Phillips Memorial Gallery after the sudden, untimely deaths of his father, Duncan Clinch Phillips , a Pittsburgh window glass millionaire, and brother, James Laughlin Phillips .
more

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s in spite of harsh opposition from the art community in France. The name of the style is derived from the title of a... Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant , which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes; open composition; emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities ; common, ordinary subject matter; the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience; and unusual visual angles. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting.
more

The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. The paintings for which the movement is named depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill,... Adirondack, and the White Mountains; eventually works by the second generation of artists associated with the school expanded to include other locales. Neither the originator of the term Hudson River School or its first published use has been fixed with certainty. The term is thought to have originated with the New York Tribune art critic Clarence Cook or the landscape painter Homer D. Martin As originally used, the term was meant disparagingly, as the work so labeled had gone out of favor when the plein-air Barbizon School had come into vogue among American patrons and collectors. Hudson River School paintings reflect three themes of America in the 19th century: discovery, exploration, and settlement. The paintings also depict the American landscape as a pastoral setting, where human beings and nature coexist peacefully.
more

The Ten American Painters, generally known as The Ten, resigned from the Society of American Artists in late 1897 to protest the commercialism of that group's exhibitions, and their circus-like atmosphere. The Society had broken away from the National Academy of Design in New York City twenty years... earlier, in a progressive movement led by Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Winslow Homer. The Ten were Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, Robert Reid, Willard Metcalf, Frank Weston Benson, Edmund Charles Tarbell, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Joseph DeCamp, and Edward Simmons. Abbott Handerson Thayer and Winslow Homer were asked to join the group when it was formed; however, they refused. When Twachtman died in 1902, William Merritt Chase joined in his place. All of The Ten were active in either New York City or Boston. They were generally considered exponents of Impressionism and established in their careers. In their charter, they agreed to resign from the Society and hold their own annual exhibition, protesting the Society’s perceived emphasis on “too much business and too little art.
more