Last weekend the exhibit Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914 opened for the public in the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, GA. With over 70 paintings the exhibition examines the work of forty-three American painters drawn to Holland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

"Dutch Utopia includes works by artists who remain celebrated today, such as Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman, and John Singer Sargent, along with painters admired in their own time but less well-known now, including accomplished women like Elizabeth Nourse and Anna Stanley, as well as George Hitchcock, Gari Melchers, and Walter MacEwen, who built international reputations with salon pictures of Dutch landscapes and costumed figures. These artists were among hundreds of Americans who traveled to the Netherlands between 1880 and 1914 to paint and to study. Some lived in Holland for decades, while others stayed only a week or two; but most passed quickly through the major cities to small rural communities, where they created picturesque idylls on canvas."

According to GPB.org the exhibit took five years of planning and research and it is the largest collection of paintings by American artists of the Netherlands that has ever been assembled.

In conjunction with Dutch Utopia there is a separate exhibition in the museum on the works of Walter MacEwen, one of the most highly decorated American artists of the late nineteenth century. He is best known for his depictions of rural Dutch life:

"Early in his career, MacEwen had also opened a studio in Hattem – a quiet medieval village in the Dutch province of Gelderland, where he spent his summers. MacEwen’s exposure to the work of seventeenth-century Dutch masters, as well as to the artists of the contemporary Hague School, exerted a considerable impact upon his developing style, and agrarian village life in Hattem inspired dozens of Dutch genre paintings that would come to define MacEwen’s mature career."

Walter MacEwen: An American Expatriate Revisited, which features additional works from Mr. Starke’s collection as well as pieces from other private and public collections and nicely complements works on display in Dutch Utopia.

The exhibition will also travel to the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands.

Telfair Museums, Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914
http://telfair.org
through January 10, 2010 in Georgia.