The second contains the works of American painters from
the beginnings to the early Twentieth Century. The Foreign Historical
Section occupies rooms 91-92 and 61-63.
Gallery 91-Early Schools. A gallery of old paintings, chiefly of the
Italian, Flemish and Dutch Schools, designed to suggest the earliest
roots of American art. Practically all the canvases are mere echoes of
the "old masters," and they may well be passed over hastily by all but
the most thorough historical student.
Gallery 92-French Influence. This gallery and the next two are
designed to show works of those schools, chiefly French, that have had
direct influence upon American art. On wall A is a painting by Courbet,
interesting in the light of that artist's influence on Whistler's early
work. But most important here are the examples of the Barbizon School,
romantic landscape painters of the mid-Nineteenth Century, who had much
to do with the development of the Inness-Wyant group in America. On wall
B are two canvases by Corot, both badly placed, one of which (1486) is
typically poetic and beautiful. The examples by Daubigny and Rousseau on
wall C are not satisfying. On wall D the two Monticellis suggest the
source of some of the rich qualities of the work of Keith and similar
American painters.
Gallery 62, adjoining 92, shows the best example of Barbizon work, in
Troyon's beautiful "Landscape and Cattle" on wall C.
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