Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on February 14, 2008 of American Masters, 1840-1920. The exhibition and sale includes over fifty works by American artists whose names are now ingrained in our cultural heritage. The art and careers of many of those included have been the subject of important exhibitions in the past few decades, and their chronologies have been charted, providing opportunities for individual works to be studied and appreciated from new angles. In the process many images have gained new importance and provided fresh insight into their creators and the eras in which they were produced.

This exhibition has an unusually large number of works of significance by prominent artists, but several are especially worthy of notice. These include the show’s keynote image, William Merritt Chase’s Child Star Elsie Leslie Lyde as Little Lord Fauntleroy (ca. 1888). Executed about midpoint in Chase’s career, the depiction of this child actress in costume evidences the distinct combination of skill, flair, and charm that Chase often realized in his portraits. While the work captures the piquant nature of its star (whose performance in the debut of this play based on the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel on Broadway was attended by Chase), the painting also reveals Chase’s propensity for the sensuous qualities of objects and materials, as demonstrated in the sumptuous fur rug on which the subject stands, the tasseled velvet cushion at her feet, and other aspects of her attire and surroundings. Chase’s admiration for Velásquez and Hals emanate from his composition and painterly handling, while the humor of this girl in a dandyish pose suggests that Chase was making a gesture to James McNeill Whistler, whose insouciant attitude he had captured in a portrait four years earlier.

Other works illuminate particular moments of artists’ lives and careers. In Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1859), Thomas Moran created a romantic, epic image, depicting a scene from Robert Browning’s poem of 1852 in which a man’s resolute, obsessive journey over a tortuous terrain to find a legendary tower will mean ultimate destruction. Winslow Homer created his watercolor Waiting (1880) in Gloucester, Massachusetts, depicting a pensive girl gazing toward an intense slice of sea in the background that allows the viewer to imagine a maritime tale of longing. The work reflects the themes of mortality and destiny that are at the basis of the powerful nature of Homer’s art.

The Promised Land (The Ferry to Appledore) (ca. 1879) is an unusual subject for William Morris Hunt, depicting an ocean journey that focuses on the travelers on the deck of a ship. The work probably dates from 1879, the year that Hunt drowned off the coast of Appledore, the ship’s destination. Patch Painting (1886) belongs to a small group of works in this genre by John Peto, which are related to his “rack” pictures, but omit a rack itself. One of Peto’s patch paintings that has his largest gathering of elements, the painting includes images of the works of Philadelphia artists whom Peto knew and references to his life in Philadelphia, alluding to the struggles he faced in attempting to achieve recognition and to even attain a basic level of subsistence.

John Twachtman’s best known images include his closely cropped, abstractly composed views of the waterfall on Horseneck Brook, which curved through his property in Greenwich, Connecticut. This exhibition includes one of Twachtman’s finest examples of this subject, a view of dappled light on the falls as it curves under a shady overhang of trees. The painting is one of few that Twachtman himself sold to a private collector, and it remained in the family of the original owner from 1898 until 1997. An innovative artist whose works reflect his study of Eastern aesthetics as well as his academic training in Paris, Arthur Wesley Dow modified his style according to the inspiration of his sites, as is demonstrated in The Destroyer (ca. 1911-13), an image of the Colorado River coursing through the granite gorge of the Grand Canyon. Dow rendered its walls in vivid purples and oranges that express the overpowering effect on him of the canyon’s color.

Other notable examples in the show are Albert Bierstadt’s Mt Shasta, California (ca. 1863), in which Bierstadt captured the geologic grandeur and the “vastness of prospect” he experienced while traveling through California on a trip west with the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow; Philip Leslie Hale’s A Summer Visit (Matunuck, Rhode Island) (1895) demonstrating the experimental approach that Hale took during summers in the 1890s, in which he searched for a way to dissolve his figures and their surroundings into an aura of light, an approach equivalent to that of the Italian Divisionists; and Edward Potthast’s The Shade (ca. 1920), a view capturing the leisurely feeling of a sun-drenched day on the coast in which the vivid colors of umbrellas are offset against the opalescence of reflected light on a sandy beach.

Such outstanding examples of American art are increasingly rare as their creators are recognized as the established leaders in the art of their time. This exhibition provides an opportunity to view this gathering of some of the highlights of a bygone era, the art of which has now entered a classic phase.