This series is presented through a partnership of the
Arts Council of Moore County and Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities
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A CENTURY OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING
 The wonders of nature attracted the most accomplished American artists of the 19th century, including Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, George Inness, and James McNeill Whistler. The spring Fine Arts Lecture Series will trace the changing attitudes toward nature expressed by these very different artists in their selection of sites and their communication of distinct world views. For Cole, the Catskill Mountains of New York represented the pristine wilderness or the ideal state of the New World before the intrusion of settlers, farms, and villages. Homer's views of the Maine coast likewise celebrated the overpowering force of the sea, as well as the hardy fishermen who risked storms and tides for their daily catch. Inness found enough to inspire one of his characteristically misty landscapes in the quiet corner of a neighbor's farm in New Jersey. Both he and Whistler were drawn to the half-lights of dawn or dusk when the moods of nature seemed to mirror the artist's emotions.
In the course of the century, artists shifted from a celebration of natural grandeur based on pride and optimism that the nation would fulfill its destiny, to a mood of retreat. The transformation of American society, from an agrarian to a capitalist economy, from a rural to an urban culture, created uneasiness among many who longed to return to the way things were. The social and political pressures of slavery, industrialization, and the growth of cities caused artists and their public to view the natural world as a refuge from modernity and to treasure unspoiled landscapes. In short, Cole's sublime mountain scenes that were understood as vistas of promise were replaced in the 1890s by landscapes that evoked feelings of loss in the face of cultural change.
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Lecture #1 - Thursday, March 13, 2008
American Wilderness: Hudson River Landscapes by Thomas Cole
 In the 1820s, Thomas Cole began producing the scenes of mountains and lakes in upstate New York that would establish him as the founder of the first distinctly American school of painting, the Hudson River School. The dramatic sites that he discovered, including Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskills and Schroon Mountain in the Adirondacks, became the favored subjects for a younger generation of painters and destinations for tourists, who were drawn to scenes hallowed by art. Cole's progress as a landscape painter was paralleled by the development of a national literature, and the characters from books by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant often found their way into the artist's landscapes. He was a gifted writer himself and his theories of landscape painting added to his reputation as America's first artist of nature. A moralizer and a romantic, he regarded nature as a living, holy place full of meaning and symbol. His lofty allegories about the future of America and the Voyage of Life were as important to artists and writers as his careful observations of natural phenomena.
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Lecture #2 - Thursday, March 27, 2008
Reconstruction & Retreat: Stories from the Maine Coast by Winslow Homer
 Winslow Homer came of age as a national artist with the end of the Civil War. He had worked on assignment for Harper's Weekly, as a special artist to the Army of the Potomac and in that capacity drew scenes of battle and camp life. His draftsman's skill at capturing a world of human relationships and feelings among soldiers was extended after the war to subjects such as schoolboys at play, huntsmen and their dogs, and the herring fishermen who worked off the Maine coast, where Homer had set up his studio in Prout's Neck. Homer's late works dispense with human activity entirely to focus on the elements of ocean, rocks, sky, and clouds. The realism of his sea paintings conveys the physical experience of walking the shoreline and feeling the moisture of the spray, while the vastness of water and sky offers a glimpse of the transcendent.
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Lecture #3 - Thursday, April 17, 2008
Visionary Landscapes: George Inness, James Whistler and Alfred Stieglitz
 Tonalist painters such as George Inness and James Whistler were the lyric poets of nature artists because they painted not what they saw, but how they felt about the scene before them. To describe a painting as tonal meant that one color prevailed over the other hues and that all objects, lights, and colors were enveloped in a gauzy atmosphere. For example, Inness' landscapes are autumnal in mood, with their reduced palette of burnt hues, diffused light and quiet subjects. Likewise Whistler, the expatriate who always considered himself an American artist, was dedicated to simplifying color and composition to better translate the spirit of nature. His paintings of night and foggy mornings along the Thames offer few clues about locale, but evoke ambiguity and mystery. Photographers like Alfred Stieglitz used soft-focus techniques and manipulated development processes so that their photographs would resemble tonalist paintings and thus achieve the status of art.
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ABOUT THE LECTURER: After presenting two popular lecture series (Impressionism in 2006 and Americans in Paris in 2007), lecturer Dr. Molly Gwinn returns with an exciting series, A Century of Landscape Painting. She earned her doctorate from Rutgers University and has taught art history at Rutgers University and New York University. She has also served as the Assistant Manager of Education at the Dallas Museum of Art.
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COST (per lecture): $10 for ACMC & Weymouth Members / $15 for Nonmembers
All Lectures will be presented at 10:00 a.m.
at Weymouth Center (555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines).
Space is limited. Register with full payment at the Arts Council Moore County's offices
at Campbell House (482 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines) or by calling 910-692-4356.
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