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October Issue
2008
Greenville County Museum of Art in
Greenville, SC, Offers Works by Lockwood de Forest
The Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, SC, is presenting the exhibit, Lockwood de Forest: Poet of Place. The exhibit of works by this late nineteenth-century landscape artist whose paintings illuminate the "oil sketch" and its contribution to American landscape painting will be on view through Oct. 19, 2008.
de Forest was born in 1850 to a wealthy and prominent New York family. His youthful enthusiasm for the visual arts was encouraged by Frederic Edwin Church, a celebrated American painter who married into his mother's family. Church welcomed young de Forest to his New York studio and exposed him to the New York art establishment, including his fellow painters of the Hudson River School, a group of artists who produced dramatic landscapes in the mid to late nineteenth century.
Landscapists and Impressionists were accustomed to painting en plein air. The French expression, translated "in the open air" means simply painting outdoors, on location. The Hudson River School artists created sketches and studies on location as part of this process, and de Forest no doubt began sketching in oil on journeys with Church, who often synthesized various scenes later into one grand painting. de Forest, however, painted the oil sketch for its own sake, and his paintings are of interest as direct renditions of landscapes as the artist saw them. The artist Joseph Goldyne, in an essay on de Forest, wrote that he rendered the landscape "as found, not as interpreted."
de Forest accomplished his paintings in a single sitting, in as little as twenty minutes or as much as two hours. He enjoyed a successful career as an interior designer and collaborated for several years with Louis Comfort Tiffany. He traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, painting wherever he went. His designs were especially influenced by the architecture and decorative arts of India.
The exhibition was organized by Sullivan-Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA.
For further information check our SC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the Museum at 864/271-7570 or visit (www.greenvillemuseum.org).
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