The Changing American Landscape

(Un)Settled: The Landscape in American Art – Revised

Mobile Museum of Art

October 12, 2024–February 2, 2025

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

June 12–September 17, 2025

There’s still time to see (Un)Settled: The Landscape in American Art, a timely reexamination of the nature of landscape painting in America.

Currently at the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. (Un)Settled explores the rich, complicated, and evolving topic of the landscape in American art, from its origins in 19th century painting into the variety of contemporary approaches. The show highlights the unsettled, or evolving, conversations around landscape and its relationship to establishing cultural and national identity over the last two centuries. This multidisciplinary project comprises of forty artworks and includes examples of material culture such as furniture, glass, ceramics, and baskets.

Washington Allston (Georgetown, South Carolina, 1779–1843, Cambridge, Massachusetts), Coast Scene on the Mediterranean, 1811, Oil on canvas, 40 x 34 in., Columbia Museum of Art, Museum Purchase with funds provided by a bequest of Dr. Robert W. Gibbes III, 1957.14

Building upon noted Hudson River School paintings, the show offers a deeper look at the topic of landscape through the eyes of different artists, including works by Fidelia Bridges, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Benny Andrews, William Christenberry, Ana Mendieta, Ed Ruscha, Jeffrey Gibson, and Jacqueline Bishop. Taken together, (Un)Settled offers a more expansive view of the topic, both in terms of the artists/makers and the scenery depicted help foreground multiple historic and cultural perspectives and ensure the conversation includes different regions of the United States and Latin America.

Thomas Cole (Bolton le Moors, England 1802–1848 Catskill, NY), View in the White Mountains, 1827, Oil on canvas, 25 ³⁄₈ x 35 ³⁄¹₆ in., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Bequest of Daniel Wadsworth, 1848.17

Albert Bierstadt (Solingen, Germany 1830–1902 New York, New York), In the Yosemite Valley, 1866, Oil on canvas, 35 ¹⁄₈ x 50 in., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt Collection, 1905.22

Erik Koeppel, A Day at the Beach, oil, 12 x 24 in.

If you want to learn the secrets of the Hudson River School and create your own majestic landscape paintings, check out master Hudson River revivalist Erik Koeppel’s instructional videos.

If a more contemporary style is what captivates you, check out a sampling of the techniques behind the many approaches in instructional videos that take you inside the studio of today’s leading landscape artists.