American Beauty and Bounty: The Judith G. and Steaven K. Jones Collection of Nineteenth-Century Painting

Many of the works in this lovely private collection are by Hudson River School painters, who focused on the landscape and pursued a highly polished, detailed technique. Key artists include first-generation practitioners Asher B. Durand and Thomas Doughty, as well as popular landscape painters of the second generation, including Albert Bierstadt, Stanford Robinson Gifford, John Frederick Kensett, and Thomas Worthington Whittredge. The collection also contains meticulously rendered stilllifes by artists such as Severin Roesen and William Harnett, in addition to scenes of American Daily Life by Eastman Johnson, Enoch Wood Perry, Jr., and others. Collectively, these paintings communicate a spirit of American optimism, of transcendental wonderment in nature, of national abundance, and even of nostalgia for ways of life that, even as the scenes were being created, seemed already to be passing.