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Now Showing

Spotlight Exhibition

On March 1, Melchers’ Madonna of the Rappahannock, loaned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, will be the feature of a “spotlight” exhibition in his former workspace at the Gari Melchers Home and Studio in Falmouth. 

Annual spotlight exhibitions from outside collections have become a tradition at Gari Melchers Home and Studio, giving local patrons a rare opportunity to view significant examples from Melchers’ body of work.  Madonna of the Rappahannock, painted in 1923, was chosen because of its ties to the Fredericksburg area. The models are Eva Fritter and her infant ward, neighbors of the artist, who pose before the banks of the Rappahannock River. The painting will be on display through Memorial Day.

Gari Melchers Highlighted in Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914

Now Showing at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati, OH

Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914 is organized by the Telfair Museum of Art in association with the Singer Laren Museum.

Exhibition Dates:

February 5 – May 2, 2010, at Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio
May 21 – August 15, 2010, at Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan
September 16, 2010 – January 16, 2011, at Singer Laren Museum, the Netherlands

Encompassing over seventy works drawn from public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe, Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914 examines the work of forty-three American painters drawn to Holland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Dutch Utopia includes works by artists who remain celebrated today, such as Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman, and John Singer Sargent, along with painters admired in their own time but less well-known now, including accomplished women like Elizabeth Nourse and Anna Stanley, as well as George Hitchcock, Gari Melchers, and Walter MacEwen, who built international reputations with salon pictures of Dutch landscapes and costumed figures. These artists were among hundreds of Americans who traveled to the Netherlands between 1880 and 1914 to paint and to study. Some lived in Holland for decades, while others stayed only a week or two; but most passed quickly through the major cities to small rural communities, where they created picturesque idylls on canvas.

Read our press release; Read what the press has to say about Dutch Utopia; Listen to the Dutch Utopia Audio Tour

Upcoming

Belmont through a Lens: Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston
March 27 - June 20

This is an exhibition of eighteen Belmont-based historic images by pioneering female photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston. Belmont through a Lens will run concurrently with the Fredericksburg Area Museum’s History through a Lens: the Photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston, a general survey of Johnston’s body of work.  Visitors to either museum may present their admission ticket at the other site to receive discounted entry.

One of the first American female photojournalists, Frances Johnston (1864-1952) built her reputation on a variety of interests that ranged from celebrity portraiture (Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt) to documentary work (student life at Tuskegee Institute and workers at the Lynn Shoe factory), to estates and gardens (those of Edith Wharton and the Duponts) and vernacular architecture of the American South.  In 1927 Johnston was granted private local funding to produce a photographic survey of important early buildings, private residences and gardens in the City of Fredericksburg and Stafford County, Virginia, including the property known as Belmont, today’s Gari Melchers Home and Studio. The outcome of her efforts, 247 images, was publicly displayed in May 1929 in Fredericksburg’s Town Hall.

That was eighty years ago. Johnston and her patron were right to be in a hurry to document these sites, for some of them were near ruin. Today many of those structures have been lost to decay or demolition.  Thanks to the careful planning of Mrs. Gari Melchers, who deeded the estate to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1942, Belmont remains one of the best preserved artist’s homes and studios in existence. Johnston’s handsome and sharply focused photographic record of Belmont, produced at a time when the Melchers’ improvements to the historic house and grounds had matured, provides the essential foundation for continuing preservation efforts at the property.

"Travels Through the Old South: Frances Benjamin Johnston and the Vernacular Architecture of Virginia"
Fredericksburg Area Museum
May 12, 7 p.m. Mansard Gallery

Elizabeth M. Gushee, Digital Collections Librarian at the University of Virginia, will give an illustrated talk on photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston's efforts to capture the fast-vanishing architectural landscape of Virginia in the 1930s. Supported by grants from the Carnegie Corporation, Johnston traveled throughout Virginia and eight other southern states photographing colonial architecture, estates, churches, gardens, farms, graveyards and mills. What originally had been envisioned by Johnston as a year-long project to document the lesser-known structures of the colonial era turned into a far more extensive venture, leading her to cover 50,000 miles in Virginia and to travel to nearly every one of its 95 counties. By the end of her eight-year stint among the southern states, she was said to have covered a distance that would circle the globe three times over.  Reception to follow. Call 540-371-3037 for details.

The New Reality: The Frontier of Realism in the 21st Century
December 4, 2010 through February 27, 2011

Organized by the International Guild of Realism, The New Reality not only showcases the latest developments in Realist painting around the world, but compares those artworks with their historical predecessors.

Fifty-six artists are represented with sixty-five paintings from the United States, Canada, The Netherlands, Korea, Russia, France, Iceland, Romania, Norway and Finland.

The images are produced in a wide variety of media, giving audiences a survey of how these artists are approaching representational art today.  Additionally each artist was asked to identify one historical painting to compare and contrast their work with the pioneers of Realism. The contributors cited such predecessors as Ingres, Da Vinci, Durer, Vermeer, Harnett, Constable, Memling and Dali as starting points for their own personal exploration into still life, landscape, figurative and narrative themes.  In some cases, the contrast between the old and the new creative approach is startling; in other cases, one can spot the heavy influence of the Old Master upon the modern “apprentice.”

The New Reality traveling tour was developed by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Kansas City, Missouri.   

View the exhibition brochure.

William H. Johnson: An American Modern
September 10, 2011 through December 4, 2011

William H. Johnson: An American Modern explores the intricate layers of Johnson's diverse cultural perspective as an artist and self-described "primitive and cultured painter." Through 20 expressionist and vernacular landscapes, still life paintings, and portraits, the exhibition positions the artist's aesthetic within the context of modernism. Johnson's visual vocabulary disguised the complexity of his approach. The exhibition situates the artist as a pivotal figure in the canon of modern American art.

William H. Johnson: An American Modern, an exhibition developed by Morgan State University and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, is made possible through the partial support of the Henry Luce Foundation.