We’re back with another #PhillyPhilly edition of Mary’s Musings. Faithful readers will know that every holiday season I make my annual pilgrimage back to Philadelphia, a city that I used to call home. This year I decided to finally visit a museum I drove by dozens of times, but unfortunately never visited – the Woodmere Art Museum.
The Woodmere Art Museum highlights the visual culture of Philadelphia. Once dubbed the “Athens of America” during the Early Republic, Philadelphia became an epicenter for the production of American culture and taste. Cultural institutions and museums across the city, like Woodmere, have preserved this legacy from the nation’s founding to the present today.
Charles Knox Smith (1845-1916), an affluent businessman in the mining industry, purchased the Woodmere estate with the intention of publicly showcasing his art collection. In 1940, the museum opened to the public. In traditional nineteenth-collecting styles, his collection contains foundational names from the Hudson River School such as Jasper Francis Cropsey, Frederick Edwin Church, Edmund Darch Lewis and William Lewis Sonntag. These bucolic landscapes bring mountainous valleys and crashing waves into the stillness of an otherwise calm parlor in Chestnut Hill. The salon style hang invites visitors to closely examine the miniature figures nestled in the hills and beams of sunlight brushwork that is riddled with impasto.
Aside from Smith’s collection, the museum also boasts a renowned assortment of works by other American artists, the majority of which have ties to the city of brotherly love. Through strategic and ongoing collecting practices, the museum continues to add to their collection of works by contemporary Philadelphia artists. Thus, a walk through Woodmere is a visual showcase of the arts in Philadelphia: both past and present.
Woodmere also has the largest collection of works by Violet Oakley, the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. One of these commissions, The Building of the House of Wisdom, is on display at Woodmere before it moves to the museum’s renovated gallery space within the next few years. The hang brings the canvases down to eye level for the viewer. Taken out of their original display context, museum visitors can engage and view Oakely’s work at eye level.
Woodmere is a charming museum that is worth an occasional revisit to see their ongoing exhibitions, recent acquisitions and shifting displays from their storage. Historic house museums have an ongoing struggle with space. Woodmere is actively digitizing their collection online to make it accessible, and it offers an inside glimpse into their rich holdings. Many of which I unfortunately did not have the opportunity to see such as works by Mary Cassatt, Robert Riggs (aside from one signed print on view!) and Cecilia Beaux.
Categories: #marysmusings, #museum, arthistory
marysmusings.art 