The Michele & Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts Shows Courier & Ives Images of the American West

Written by Ivan Cutler Monday, 14 May 2012 22:26

Springfield, MA.- Currier & Ives images of the American West will be on view at the Michele & Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts from June 28th through January 29th, 2012 in the special exhibition "Imagining the Frontier:  Landscape and Hunting Scenes of the American West". Fascination with the Western frontier had a major influence on American art in the 19th century. Currier & Ives mass produced images that witnessed the great drama of Westward expansion, including the California gold rush, trappers and pioneers traveling to unknown territories, conflicts with Indians, buffalo hunting, fires on the prairie, and the building of the transcontinental railroad.

Over 60 million buffalo once roamed the American plains. One 19th-century traveler noted that “the plains were black and appeared as in motion.” The majority of the artists who worked for Currier & Ives never visited the Great Plains and had to rely on written accounts of the appearance of buffalo to create their designs. The result was that in some Currier & Ives prints, such as The Rocky Mountains, the buffalo look a bit like furry lions. By 1893, only 300 buffalo remained, and they were brought back from the edge of extinction only by continued conservation efforts over the last one hundred years. Images such as The Great West, with a steam train crossing a vast landscape, showed the expanse of the American frontier, a popular and saleable subject for Currier & Ives lithographs.


The title helped to romanticize the idea of Westward expansion.  In 1870, they used the word "great" in as many as nine different titles. Through the use of this imagery Currier & Ives promoted the natural beauty of the American landscape and expressed pride in the country’s expansion across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. In many cases, the prints represented the winning of the West as a triumph not of the white man over the wilderness but over the Native American. Today historians often criticize Currier & Ives for the blend of fantasy and reality in their images of the West.

The Springfield Museums, located in the heart of downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, is comprised of five world-class museums; the Michele & Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts., the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, the Springfield Science Museum, the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum and the Museum of Springfield History. The Museums Association is proud to be home to the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden, a series of full–scale bronze sculptures of Dr. Seuss's whimsical creations, honoring the birthplace of Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. \


The Michele & Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts is one of the two Springfield Museums dedicated to fine and decorative arts. The Art Deco-style museum was erected in response to a bequest from Mr. & Mrs. James Philip Gray, who left their entire estate for the “selection, purchase, preservation, and exhibition of the most valuable, meritorious, artistic, and high class oil paintings obtainable,” and for the construction of a museum to house them. The museum opened in 1934. The first floor of the museum is dedicated to American art ranging from "Portrait of Nymphas Marston" by John Singleton Copley to "Promenade on the Beach" by Winslow Homer to Contemporary glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly. The American collection also includes the country's only permanent museum gallery dedicated to the lithographs of Currier & Ives. The second floor is a chronological tour of the museum's fine European art collection. Beginning in the Middle Ages with an intricate 15th-century, Hispano-Flemish Fuentes Retable (altarpiece), the galleries lead visitors through the Renaissance and subsequent centuries with fine paintings from Italy and France. The Dutch and Flemish collection is particularly strong. Familiar names in the Impressionism Gallery include Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Paul Gauguin. Traveling exhibitions can be found in the Wheeler Gallery. Performances, lectures and presentations are offered in the Davis Auditorium. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.springfieldmuseums.org/

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