The artist Edward Beyer came to the U.S. from Germany after the Revolution of 1848. For several years Beyer, a graduate of the Düsseldorf Academy, traveled around the northeast U.S. and Ohio, sketching, painting oil landscapes, and exhibiting a moving panorama. In the mid-1850s he traveled to Virginia where he made panoramic oils in the…
Request ProgramAmerican Art Through 1950
Depictions of the American Landscape
Although activists often pinpoint its genesis in the 1960s, the environmental movement in the United States has roots in 19th-century American landscape painting. Beginning with the Hudson River School, artists, predominately painters, have depicted the environment as an allusion to such disparate ideologies as manifest destiny, environmental concerns, gendered places, or literary devices. Looking at…
Request ProgramThe Agecroft Story
Come hear the extraordinary story of how Agecroft Hall moved from Lancashire, England to Richmond, Virginia! Agecroft Hall started life as a rural estate in the 16th century, but several hundred years later, the Industrial Revolution was rapidly encroaching on the bucolic manor. Learn why T.C. Williams, Jr. chose the house to become the centerpiece of…
Request ProgramImpressionable Youth
Themes of childhood and family recur in nineteenth-century French Impressionist painting, from Berthe Morisot’s experimental self-portraits with her daughter Julie Manet, to Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s everyday scenes of his three sons and their nanny. Drawing primarily upon works from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, this lecture will closely…
Request ProgramVMFA’s Little Giant Controversy: Stuart Davis, Modernism, and Cold War Politics
In 1950, Stuart Davis’ Little Giant Still Life went on view at VMFA as part of an avant-garde American painting exhibition. When the cubist-inflected canvas entered the permanent collection, the museum found itself in the midst of a highly publicized debate between leading New York critics and Virginia traditionalists. This lecture relates the unfolding scandal…
Request ProgramA Tale of Two Sofas: Belter at VMFA
Following several years of new research and an extensive conservation campaign, a magnificent pair of sofas in the VMFA collection have emerged with a captivating history and a distinctive look. Produced by the celebrated furniture maker John Henry Belter over 160 years ago, the near-identical sofas graced the homes of powerful American businessmen and socialites…
Request ProgramThe Pursuit: Frederic Remington and the Buffalo Soldiers
Few artists are as closely associated with the American West as Frederic Remington (1861 – 1909). Best known for his illustrations, bronze sculptures, and paintings of cowboys, he also found a favorite subject in U.S. Cavalrymen, especially the hard-riding soldiers of the 9th and 10th Regiments, known also as Buffalo Soldiers. This lecture explores Remington’s images of these renowned African American regiments and, in particular, his striking canvas, The Pursuit (1896 – 98) in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ collection.
Request Program“Loving Comrades”: Artists and Soldiers in Civil War America
This lecture explores the different ways American painters — from New York-based Winslow Homer to Richmond-based William D. Washington — responded to the divisive violence and moral discord of this country’s Civil War. It also addresses their career shifts in the immediate aftermath of war as its lingering effects led to different kinds of reconstruction.
Request ProgramKeeping Up Appearances: Art and Culture in the Edwardian Period
Experience the culture, art, and fashion of this sumptuous era as you take a journey on both sides of the Atlantic — from the castles and manors of landed lords in England to the estates and mansions of wealthy tycoons in America — to see how the “other half” lived.
Request ProgramHenry Box Brown: Famous Fugitive, Trans-Atlantic Performer
Henry Brown escaped from slavery by shipping himself in a box from Richmond to Philadelphia. This bold feat was only the first act of a remarkable career. “Resurrected” from the box as Henry Box Brown, he appeared at antislavery meetings as a singer and speaker. In 1850, Brown produced a moving panorama, a kind of giant painted scroll presented in a theater, called Mirror of Slavery and toured it around New England and then across the Atlantic. Trace this remarkable journey with Jeffrey Ruggles, former Curator of Prints and Photographs, Virginia Historical Society, and author of The Unboxing of Henry Brown, Library of Virginia, 2003.
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