Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum February 15, 2003 to September 12, 2004 Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Art Museum logo
A Word from P&G - Overview of Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Painters and the Big Picture - discusses how Cincinnati Artists fit into a larger art historical perspective The Works from The P&G Collection - themed galleries of the works in the show Index by Artist Name - a list of all the artists represented in the show and the works they completed Go back to the Cincinnati Art Museum Home page
Beginning in the late 1820s, the Hudson River School, a loose group of artists in the Northeast, rose to prominence as the most esteemed American painters. For these artists, Thomas Cole (who, as a young man, lived in Steubenville, Ohio) became the unofficial leader. Cole and his followers celebrated the unique qualities of the American wilderness and saw it as emblematic of divine blessing and national strength. Their compositions relied on seventeenth-century prototypes, yet at the same time the artists recorded their own observations of nature lovingly, with smooth brushwork and fine detail. In his landscapes, Cole sometimes combined real and imagined elements to impart profound moral lessons. His example proved particularly important for Robert S. Duncanson, who arrived in Cincinnati in the 1840s and became the first African American painter to achieve professional success in the American art world.
Located at the edge of the frontier and easily reached by the Ohio River, Cincinnati attracted landscape painters as California would later in the century. By the 1840s, when Duncanson, William Louis Sonntag, and Worthington Whittredge established themselves in Cincinnati, the city was a rapidly growing metropolis with opportunities for sales and exhibitions only a couple of eastern cities could match. For the education of landscape painters, the city’s collectors provided classic examples of Hudson River School painting. Learning what they could from these collections, these young painters set out into the nearby wilderness, which—like the Hudson River Valley—provided endless inspiration in its gently rolling hills, placid waterholes, and picturesque views of the winding Ohio River and its tributaries.
In the early 1850s, funding from astute Cincinnati businessmen enabled these painters to travel and study the full range of American and European landscape painting. Their mature works, represented superbly in the Procter & Gamble Collection, earned them the esteem of national critics and collectors who deemed them an excellent Western branch of the Hudson River School.
Robert S. Duncanson (1821–1872)
Landscape with Waterfall, 1853
oil on canvas
41 3/8 x 55 1/2 in.