Co-organized by the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Paul G. Allen Family Collection, Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection explores the development of landscape painting from a small window on the world to expressions of artists’ experiences with their surroundings on land and sea.
The exhibition begins with Jan Brueghel the Younger’s allegorical series of the five senses. These exquisite, highly detailed paintings provide a platform for visitors to explore the exhibition by considering their own experience with the world through sight, touch, smell, sound and taste. The next section of the exhibition demonstrates the power of landscape to locate the viewer in time and place—to record, explore, and understand the natural and man-made world. Artists began to interpret the specifics of a picturesque city, a parcel of land, or dramatic natural phenomena. This collection features a stunning group of evocative Venetian scenes by Canaletto, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and J.M.W. Turner, among others. The exhibition also features a rare landscape masterpiece by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, Birch Forest of 1903.
The final section of the exhibition explores the paintings of European and American artists working in the complexity of the 20th century. In highly individualized ways, artists as diverse as Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, David Hockney">David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha bring fresh perspectives to traditional landscape subjects.Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection is co-organized by Portland Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum and the Paul G. Allen Family Collection.View in Venice-The Grand Canal, 1874, Édouard Manet, French, 1832-1883, oil on canvas, 22 9/16 x 18 3/4 in., Paul G. Allen Family Collection.