For a larger view
of works of art,
click on images.

Newsletter - Spring 2001
Future Exhibitions - Collections Travel

American and European Art from the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum

Two current exhibitions, one at Colby College and one at Vassar College, feature important components of the museum's collection. At the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, American Art from the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum will be on view February 11 - April 1, 2001. The installation opens with Albert Bierstadt's Hetch Hetchy Canyon, which was among the College's first art acquisitions. The painting was acquired to celebrate the opening in 1876 of what was then the new art gallery in Williston Hall. Hetch Hetchy Canyon was a gift from the wives of two trustees, who purchased the painting only a year after Bierstadt completed it - a foresighted example of support for contemporary art at that time. Since 1876, the museum's American collection has been enriched by a number of significant gifts and purchases. A decade following the acquisition of Hetch Hetchy Canyon, another significant American landscape painting came to the museum. George Inness' Saco Ford: Conway Meadows, also included in the Colby College exhibition, is now the painting most frequently requested for loan by other institutions.

Paintings by Joseph Goodhue Chandler, Erastus Salisbury Field, and others exemplify the importance of portraiture in the history of American art. Two of Chandler's sitters whose portraits are in the exhibition have a special relationship to Mount Holyoke. South Hadley resident John Dwight, who made his fortune in baking soda, provided funding for a building to house the new Department of Art and Archaeology in 1900. The building was named as a memorial to Nancy Everett Dwight, his deceased first wife and a graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary.

The museum's holdings of 20th-century art were enhanced when financier Roy Neuberger contributed 19 paintings between 1953 and 1963, including a stunning portrait by Robert Henri, Annie Lavelle, and Milton Avery's Discussion. New York art dealers David and Renée McKee (class of 1962) have given or facilitated the gift of a number of important modern and contemporary paintings to the museum that will be shown at Colby, including works by Philip Guston, Katherine Porter, and Sean Scully.

Sculpture in the Colby show ranges from Hiram Powers' neoclassical marble bust Faith, which evokes the idealism of Greek art, to the surrealist biomorphism of Isamu Noguchi's Strange Bird.

Meanwhile, at Vassar's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, European Painting Highlights from the Collection of Mount Holyoke College is on view. The installation includes major paintings by Dutch and Flemish artists such as Joos van Cleve, Joachim Wtewael, and Jan Both, along with important Italian Baroque works by Luca Giordano, Ciro Ferri, and Corrado Giaquinto. The museum's holdings of French painting will be represented by splendid neoclassical landscape and portraiture, as well as works by key Barbizon artists such as Charles Daubigny and Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña. The installation will be ongoing through the summer, so be sure to visit if your travels take you to the Hudson Valley. (For information about hours and driving directions, call the Colby College Museum of Art at 207-872-3228 or the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at 914-437-5237. Information is also available on the websites of both museums: www.colby.edu/museum and vassun.vassar.edu/~fllac.)