The Michener Art Museum Showcases 200 of Bucks County’s Finest Works

Written by Gabriella Knowles Friday, 21 October 2011 22:12

Doylestown, Pennsylvania.- The James A. Michener Art Museum is proud to present "The Painterly Voice: Bucks County’s Fertile Ground", on view at the museum from October 22nd through through April 1st 2012. This exhibition brings together more than 200 of Bucks County’s finest works. Paintings by Daniel Garber, Edward Redfield, Fern Coppedge, and other legends of the Bucks County painting tradition, drawn from the finest work in regional collections, will be together for the first and only time in The Painterly Voice. One of Edward Hicks’s “The Peaceable Kingdom,” one of the best-known and most beloved images in the history of American art, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be a highlight of The Painterly Voice, as will rarely seen gems from private collections.

It may be hard to imagine now, but when the Bucks County landscape painters first came to national prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landscape painting was one of the cutting edge, avant-garde styles of the day. Painters like Edward W. Redfield, Daniel Garber and Robert Spencer built stellar careers, and many Bucks County artists exhibited and won prizes at the most prestigious art venues in the country. For a time, the art world came to Bucks County to find the most accomplished and experienced artists who would sell their work in galleries around the country and serve as jurors for important juried exhibits. “We know we belong to the land,” wrote Doylestown resident and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II for his 1943 musical Oklahoma! When you visit the Michener Art Museum in Bucks County, not only are you seeing the paintings created by the region’s finest artists, but you are seeing the land that inspired them. For more than 200 years, Bucks County’ fertile ground has nurtured the creativity of writers, actors, musicians and especially visual artists.

During the American impressionist movement, from Connecticut to California and many spots in between, art colonies were born and prospered. Each place had its own story, its colorful characters, and its own personality. Many of the colonies were made up of summer warriors, successful artists looking for a quiet place to make paintings when the weather was warm. “The New Hope artists were an art colony year round,” says Brian H. Peterson, the Michener’s Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator. “They lived here, worked here, paid their taxes here, raised their children here, made many friends here and, most importantly, responded to the sense of place in their artwork.” William L. Lathrop and his wife, Annie, nurtured the New Hope colony in their home at Phillips Mill. When Robert Spencer needed feedback about a picture, he called his friend Jack Folinsbee who lived just down the street. When Spencer’s daughters needed someone to play with, Rae Sloan Bredin’s two little girls were within shouting distance. “When Lathrop needed to share the latest news about the boat he was building, his friend Henry Snell would wander by,” continues Peterson. “And when wedding bells were about to chime, people congregated on the lawn of Lathrop’s house at Phillips Mill.”

What distinguishes Bucks County’s painterly heritage is not any singular, recognizable style, but rather a diversity of “fingerprints” – genres, tools and techniques. It’s this very diversity that is the most characteristic quality of Bucks County painting. “But the word ‘diversity’ doesn’t do justice to the depth and breadth of the story of the region’s masters of canvas and brush,” says Peterson. “It’s the elusive but essential quality of individuality – what some call style or originality, but is better described by the more poetic term ‘voice’ – that the rich creative soil of Bucks County has most nurtured over the decades.” Harry Leith-Ross, poet of the ordinary; the wise silence of Daniel Garber; the nights and days of George Sotter; A tale of two (John) Folinsbees; the dancing trees of Fern Coppedge; the cities, towns, and crowds of Robert Spencer; the vibrant, energetic snowscenes of Edward W. Redfield; the radical stylistic evolution of Charles Rosen; hear these stories and more in "The Painterly Voice". Some Bucks County landscape painters took a different path. These artists were aware of the stylistic experimentation going on in Europe and New York, and decided to give it a try themselves. The artwork pushes the envelope in one way or another: sometimes it’s color, sometimes it’s the drawing style, sometimes it’s the way paint is applied to the canvas. These artists were fascinated with symbols, with rhythm, with surface. Still others were more interested in man-made subject matter – machines, urban environments – over natural beauty. And let us not forget the work of artists undiscovered in their lifetime, yet highly regarded in today’s art world, such as Morgan Colt, whose wrought iron work was more well known at his premature death than his paintings.


In 1988, with the support of many dedicated citizens, the James A. Michener Art Museum opened as an independent, non-profit cultural institution dedicated to preserving, interpreting and exhibiting the art and cultural heritage of the Bucks County region. The Museum is named for Doylestown's most famous son, the Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and supporter of the arts who had first dreamed of a regional art museum in the early 1960's. In November of 1999, the James A. Michener Art Museum publicly announced the largest single gift in the institution's history. Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest gave the Museum an extensive collection of fifty-nine paintings by important regional artists of the Pennsylvania Impressionist School. The museum is now home to a world class collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings. Ensconced in the Museum's walled, lush "back yard" is an outdoor gallery, the Patricia D. Pfundt Sculpture Garden. Sculptures are on view in a natural setting that pays homage to the Bucks County landscape which has inspired countless artists. The Museum hosts nationally touring special exhibitions and also showcases important regional artists. In its first two decades, the James A. Michener Art Museum has amassed a permanent collection of over 2,200 objects that reveal the rich artistic and cultural heritage of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, region. From Thomas Hicks' and Jonathan Trego's mid-nineteenth-century portraits, to Edward W. Redfield's twentieth-century impressionist landscapes, to the family photographs of contemporary artist Emmet Gowin, the Michener Art Museum's permanent collection documents the changing relationships of artists to their physical and cultural environments as well as the technical and conceptual innovations that are part of the vibrant and colorful history of Bucks County's visual arts. The Michener Art Museum's mission to serve as a center for the study of the region's artistic traditions guides the museum's collecting focus on art of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, region. With that vision the Michener has acquired what is arguably the finest collection of Pennsylvania impressionist paintings in public hands. The strong Arts and Crafts and modern studio furniture traditions of southeastern Pennsylvania represent a significant collecting opportunity; and the museum is actively building collections in these areas as it expands its holdings of contemporary painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts. Visit the museum's website at ... www.michenerartmuseum.org

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