Small-scale paintings ...(Current and coming)

Two exhibitions on view at the National Academy Museum in New York City until April 30 feature American works of art executed on a small scale. One group of paintings reflects the personal viewpoint of Frederic Edwin Church, who painted them. The other reflects the taste of Henry and Sharon Martin, a Connecticut couple who have been collecting American paintings for the last twenty-five years. Both shows comprise an exploration into how painters of the Hudson River school reduced majestic scenes to fit into small formats, and how they used these usually quick oil sketches as aide-memoire for large-scale finished canvases painted in their studios.

Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church consists of some eighteen paintings that Church framed and hung on the walls of Olana, the exotic Moorish style house he designed and built high above the Hudson Highlands, near Hudson, New York, in 1872. This is the first time paintings from the house have been lent as a group. At Olana they hang throughout the crowded, but artful interiors, surrounded by bric-a-brac, travel mementos, rich textiles, and paintings by artists Church admired, such as Martin Johnson Heade. The setting at Olana, however striking, is not optimal for the visitor who wants to examine a particular work of art closely. So this exhibition gives the Church enthusiast a chance to see these works in detail and at leisure. The examples on view in the show are drawn from some seven hundred oil sketches, paintings, and works on paper that were among nearly three thousand that Church left in the house at his death in 1900. Later, some two thousand artworks were donated by his son to the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The oil studies reveal much about Church's working methods. One is a beautifully executed impressionistic sketch of the Parthenon and ...