Envisioning America: Deerfield Academy’s Collection of Paintings and Drawings

Historic Deerfield will present a new exhibition, Envisioning America: Deerfield Academy’s Collection of Paintings and Drawings, which highlights significant works of art from the Academy’s collection, many of which have not been on public view for decades. Deerfield Academy, a private boarding school located in Old Deerfield, possesses a rich collection of American art, ranging from colonial American portraiture to early 20th-century modernism. A majority of the works belonged to Rowena Russell Potter (Mrs. Lucius D. Potter, 1880-1960) of the neighboring town of Greenfield. They were given to the Academy in 1960 in honor of her father, Charles P. Russell. Potter collected a chronological overview of American art and provided the Academy with a lasting resource for art education. Her acquisitions coincided with the emerging study of American art around World War II and a taste for 18th- and 19th-century artists that would come to define the field. She also formed a significant collection of American decorative arts, which she gave to Historic Deerfield at the same time.

The Academy collection includes a “who’s who” of American art across the centuries, and the exhibition explores a range of artistic styles and themes. Eighteenth-century works by British colonial painters John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West captured the likenesses of early colonists and landscapes as they maintained transatlantic ties to England. After the American Revolution, artists such as Charles Willson Peale represented the emerging republic and considered how best to visualize a new nation. With the onset of the Civil War, painter Eastman Johnson focused upon realistic genre scenes and portrayals of American life as a response to social change in the country. William H. Beard and John F. Peto explored similar themes in their fields of animal and still-life painting.

By the late 19th century, American landscape painters George Inness and Ralph Albert Blakelock portrayed atmospheric scenes tied to a more personal response to nature. Blakelock created haunting landscapes that captured the stillness and mystery of night, experimenting with painting techniques to portray moonlit scenes. As a cosmopolitan group studying abroad, other artists increasingly shifted toward impressionistic styles and modernist subjects, as seen with works by Childe Hassam, Homer Dodge Martin, and Robert Henri. This exhibition brings together a rich assemblage of Deerfield Academy’s American paintings and drawings to explore the artists and narratives that underpin American art history before the first World War.

Included with general admission. No advance registration required.