Photo courtesy of Reading Public Museum
Daniel Garber, Goat Hill, by 1930, 58 9/16 x 68 7/16 x 4 1/2, oil on canvas.
American Impressionism: The Lure of the Artists’ Colony, which opened March 7 and will run through May 31 at the Dayton Art Institute, comes from the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania.
The American Impressionism exhibit will feature more than 100 artworks by American painters from the 1880s to the 1940s. Artists included are John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, John Henry Twachtman and many others. A good number have a connection with the Philadelphia area, home to several such colonies in the Delaware and Brandywine river valleys.
Daniel Garber was one of the leading artists associated with the New Hope, Bucks County group.
He was born in Indiana. His early training was at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and, later, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught for 40 years.
Garber often worked on a large scale, using photographs and several carefully executed drawings to refine his design. This gives his work a subtle abstract quality. We can see this in the horizontal registers and the grid-like patterns of trees and rocks. To my eyes, Garber’s work has a lyrical quality. He had a great touch as well, with sinewy trees and branches and mosaic-like touches of color. Interest in Garber’s work has increased in recent decades; a catalogue raisonné was published in 2006.
“Out of the realism of the Bucks County countryside, (Garber) created an ideal, almost mystical world,” says Lauren Rabb in Pennsylvania Impressionists: Painters of the New Hope School, the exhibition catalog for a 1990 show at Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York.
Because the Reading Museum collected heavily in the early part of the 20th Century, there are many wonderful artists to discover in this show.
Also on view through May 31 at the Dayton Art Institute is In the Garden: Works on Paper from the Permanent Collection. Scott Schweigert, curator of art and civilization at the Reading Public Museum, will lecture at 6:30 p.m. April 16.
Nationally renowned local artist Michael McEwan teaches painting and drawing classes at his Clintonville area studio.
