Hood Museum of Art Presents Embracing Elegance: American Art from the Huber Family Collection

HANOVER, NH.- America at the turn of the twentieth century was characterized by dramatic social, cultural, and artistic change. The works in Embracing Elegance, 1885–1920: American Art from the Huber Family Collection represent a diversity of reactions to that change while generally featuring intimate, informal subjects captured in a personally expressive manner influenced variously by the Aesthetic movement, impressionism, urban realism, and postimpressionism. The exhibition features over thirty pastels, drawings, watercolors, and paintings by such leading artists of the period as Cecilia Beaux, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Joseph DeCamp, Robert Henri, Lilla Cabot Perry, John Singer Sargent, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, John Henry Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir. All of the works were collected over the past twenty-five years by Jack Huber, Dartmouth Class of 1963, and his wife, Russell.

A few of the images address societal change explicitly, including the vigorously painted city scenes that depict a mix of classes and races by the so-called Ashcan artists, including John Sloan and Everett Shinn. Most of the works, however, reflect the more prevalent tendency to retreat from gritty, anxiety-provoking social issues. They celebrate instead beauty as found in timeless pastoral landscapes, poetic still lifes, and, especially, intimate images of attractive women at ease. Introspective in mood and refined in taste, such works mirror more subtle shifts in cultural values, including a growing fascination with the life of the mind and an appreciation of art for art’s sake, rather than for moralizing, didactic, or political purposes.

Despite their varied artistic predilections, most of the artists in the Huber family collection gave careful consideration to how they presented their works, and the turn of the twentieth century was one of the most innovative eras in terms of frame design. Whereas only a few of the works featured in the exhibition still retain their original, artist-approved frames, over the past decade the Hubers have replaced many reproduction frames on other works with elegant period examples. These carefully selected frames enhance the visual impact of the works they surround and reflect the sophisticated frame aesthetics of the period.

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