Mitchell Gallery Exhibit in Annapolis

AUGUST 25 – OCTOBER 15, 2017
This exhibition of English and German 19th-century Romantic landscape drawings conveys the shift from classical subjects and the rational, scientific world of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to themes of nature as a source for inspiration and emotional expression. Artists include Alexander Cozens, Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, Joseph Koch, J.M.W. Turner, Caspar Wolf, and other noted artists of the period.

September 12 Curator’s Lecture. Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum will lecture on “The Lure of Nature: How British and German Romantics Explored Landscapes at Home and Abroad” at 5:30 p.m. in the Conversation Room, across from the Gallery.
During the late eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, British and German artists routinely journeyed into nature to explore and record their surroundings in drawings. Working outdoors had a long tradition, but until the romantic period it had not been so widespread and such a standard part of artistic practice. Jennifer Tonkovich will explore the reasons for this burgeoning interest in the landscape and the practice of working from nature. A close examination of drawings in the exhibition The Lure of Nature will serve as a point of departure for better understanding how and why this practice was particularly suited to the Romantic sensibility and worldview.