THE SIMPLE PLEASURES OF STILL LIFE

Posted by Layla on October 23, 2015 in ART

The Musée du Louvre, the High Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Terra Foundation for American Art will present the final installation in their four-year collaboration focusing on the history of American art. American Encounters: The Simple Pleasures of Still Life explores how late 18th- and early 19th-century American artists adapted European still-life tradition to American taste, character and experience. The culminating presentation of the American Encounters series, The Simple Pleasures of Still Life follows previous installations examining important genres in American art, including portraiture, landscape and genre paintings.

The masterpieces in The Simple Pleasures of Still Life speak to the range of the still-life genre in the U.S. from the simple table top presentations of Raphelle Peale, Martin Johnson Heade, Joseph Biays Ord, and William Sidney Mount to the sly, trick-of-the-eye compositions by De Scott Evans, John Haberle, William Michael Harnett and George Cope. Two paintings by John-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Abraham Mignon demonstrate the European examples frequently emulated by American artists first experimenting with still life in the early 1800s. The presentation at the High will be supplemented with four additional paintings drawn from the museum’s extensive holdings in American art, including works by William Mason Brown, Joseph Decker and John Frederick Peto.

POSSE PHOTOS: