6:00pm Cocktails (cash bar), 6:30pm Program in The Grant Room
Please join us at the Union League for a Library Hour program featuring Anna O. Marley, Curator of American Historical Art at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, who will delve into the important and underexplored tradition of landscape representation in Philadelphia from the Early American Republic to the Centennial Exhibition (1876) and how that corpus shaped the better-known Hudson River School. Based on an exhibit at the Academy curated by Ms. Marley, she will explore Philadelphia's key role in the growth of American landscape painting.
Thomas Cole, who is widely regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, began his career as a landscape painter after living and training in Philadelphia. During the time he spent in the city in the 1820s, he was influenced by the work of Thomas Doughty and Thomas Birch, whose American landscapes were on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Doughty and Birch were only two of many landscape painters living and exhibiting their work in Philadelphia at the time, including Charles Willson Peale, James Peale, William Russell Birch, John Lewis Krimmel, Joshua Shaw, Jacob Eichholtz, and Russell Smith. From the Schuylkill to the Hudson will place special emphasis on representations of local waterways in order to showcase the manner in which these Philadelphia water views, whether of the Schuylkill, the Wissahickon, or Delaware, constituted some of the earliest and most influential sites within American visual culture.