Established | 1940 |
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Location | 9201 Germantown Avenue, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
Coordinates | 40°04′59″N75°13′10″W / 40.0831°N 75.2195°W |
Type | Art museum |
Public transit access | SEPTA bus: 97, L |
Website | Woodmereartmuseum.org |
Woodmere Art Museum, located in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has a collection of paintings, prints, sculpture and photographs focusing on artists from the Delaware Valley and includes works by Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Severo Antonelli, Jasper Francis Cropsey (The Spirit of Peace), Joan Wadleigh Curran, Daniel Garber, Edward Moran, Violet Oakley, Herbert Pullinger, Edward Willis Redfield, Nelson Shanks, Jessie Willcox Smith, Benjamin West (The Fatal Wounding of Sir Philip Sidney), Philip Jamison, Barbara Bullock and N. C. Wyeth (Anthony and Mr. Bonnyfeather). [1]
The collection includes the Violet Oakley lunette paintings of The Child and Tradition, Youth and the Arts, and Man and Science. [2]
Woodmere provides art classes for adults and children and conducts a variety of special events and exhibitions including gallery talks, field trips, lectures, concerts and an annual juried exhibition.
The museum was opened in 1940, founded by Charles Knox Smith (1845–1916), an oil and mining businessman, in his will. Smith was born in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia and began his career as a grocer's boy and as an oil wagon driver. He rose to become a partner in that oil firm and subsequently invested in his own oil brokerage and a gold and silver mining company in Mexico.
Smith's collection of paintings, sculpture and antiques form the base of the permanent collection. It is housed in his Victorian mansion, Woodmere, to which Smith had added large exhibition spaces.
Jasper Francis Cropsey was an important American landscape artist of the Hudson River School.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the first and oldest art museum and art school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th- and 20th-century American paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Its archives house important materials for the study of American art history, museums, and art training. It offers a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Fine Arts, certificate programs, and continuing education.
The Brandywine Museum of Art is a museum of regional and American art located on U.S. Route 1 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania on the banks of the Brandywine Creek. The museum showcases the work of Andrew Wyeth, a major American realist painter, and his family: his father N.C. Wyeth, illustrator of many children's classics; his sister Ann Wyeth McCoy, a composer and painter; and his son Jamie Wyeth, a contemporary American realist painter.
Jessie Willcox Smith was an American illustrator during the Golden Age of American illustration. She was considered "one of the greatest pure illustrators". A contributor to books and magazines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Smith illustrated stories and articles for clients such as Century, Collier's, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, McClure's, Scribners, and the Ladies' Home Journal. She had an ongoing relationship with Good Housekeeping, which included a long-running Mother Goose series of illustrations and also the creation of all of the Good Housekeeping covers from December 1917 to 1933. Among the more than 60 books that Smith illustrated were Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.
Violet Oakley was an American artist. She was the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, she was renowned as a pathbreaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men. Oakley excelled at murals and stained glass designs that addressed themes from history and literature in Renaissance-revival styles.
Elizabeth Shippen Green was an American illustrator. She illustrated children's books and worked for publications such as The Ladies' Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post and Harper's Magazine.
Anne Julie d'Harnoncourt was an American curator, museum director, and art historian specializing in modern art. She was the director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), a post she held from 1982 until her sudden death in 2008. She was also an expert scholar on the works of French artist Marcel Duchamp.
William Newport Goodell (1908–1999) was an American artist, craftsman, and educator. He was born August 16, 1908 in Germantown, Philadelphia and briefly attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), including its country school in Chester Springs, studying under Pennsylvania impressionist Daniel Garber and noted academician Joseph Thurman Pearson, Jr., before opening his own studio on Germantown Avenue in 1929.
Alice Kent Stoddard (1883–1976) was an American painter of portraits, landscapes, and seascapes. Many of her works, particularly portraits, are in public collections, including University of Pennsylvania's portrait collection, Woodmere Art Museum, and other museums. She lived and painted on Monhegan Island in Maine, an enclave of artists. During World War II, she worked as a combat artist and drafted designs for airplanes. She married late in life to Joseph Pearson, who had been a friend and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Edith Emerson was an American painter, muralist, illustrator, writer, and curator. She was the life partner of acclaimed muralist Violet Oakley and served as the vice-president, president, and curator of the Woodmere Art Museum in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1940 to 1978.
Robert Beck is an American painter and writer. He is best known for his plein air paintings of scenes in and around Bucks County, Pennsylvania ; Jonesport, Maine; and New York City, typically in multiple-painting series.
Walter Elmer Schofield was an American Impressionist landscape and marine painter. Although he never lived in New Hope or Bucks County, Schofield is regarded as one of the Pennsylvania Impressionists.
Harry "Tony" Leith-Ross was a British-American landscape painter and teacher. He taught at the art colonies in Woodstock, New York and Rockport, Maine, and later was part of the art colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania. A precise draftsman and a superb colorist, Leith-Ross is considered one of the Pennsylvania Impressionists.
Elizabeth Kitchenman Coyne was a Pennsylvania impressionist painter, best known for her landscapes and paintings of horses. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Woodmere Art Museum and the Philadelphia Art Alliance.
The Newington-Cropsey Foundation (NCF) is a nonprofit private organization based in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. The foundation's aim is to maintain and preserve the works of Jasper Cropsey and the art movement he was a part of, the Hudson River School. The foundation also promotes representational painting and sculpture.
Louise D. Clement-Hoff was an American painter and educator who specialized in oil painting, pastel and drawing of human figures and still lifes.
Jesse Talbot was an American landscape painter and a friend of the poet Walt Whitman. Born in Dighton, Massachusetts, Talbot worked for the American Tract Society and other evangelical Christian organizations in New York City before becoming a professional artist, first exhibiting in the National Academy of Design in 1838. His work was often favorably compared to that of Thomas Cole and other leaders of the Hudson River School of American landscape painters. Talbot developed a friendship with Walt Whitman in the 1850s. The notebook in which Whitman first wrote down the ideas for Leaves of Grass is known as the “Talbot Wilson notebook” because Talbot’s name and address are written on the inside front cover. Talbot died in relative obscurity in 1879.
Joseph Thurman Pearson Jr. was an American landscape and portrait painter, and an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Joseph Harrison Jr. was an American mechanical engineer, financier and art collector. He made a fortune building locomotives for Russia, and was decorated by Czar Nicholas I for completing the Saint Petersburg-Moscow Railway.
Reba Dickerson-Hill was a self-taught Philadelphia artist who painted in the ancient Japanese ink-and- brush technique called sumi-e. She was also a watercolorist and oil painter who primarily produced landscapes and portraits.
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