New London, CT - Lyman Allyn Art Museum announces a new exhibition, At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch. The exhibition opens at Lyman Allyn Art Museum on Friday, October 12, 2007 and runs through February 25, 2008. The show then travels to the Newington-Cropsey Foundation in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where it will be on view March 17 through May 31, 2008.

Despite a fifty-year career as a landscape painter, Christopher Cranch’s paintings are little known. Instead, he is best known for his poetry, his ties to the New England Transcendentalists, and, above all, his playful caricature of Ralph Waldo Emerson as an enormous “transparent” eyeball, perched atop a minuscule body in top hat and tails, optic nerve tied in a pony tail. From his first reading of Emerson’s Nature essay (1836), Cranch was inspired to explore Transcendental concepts through visual means; although ultimately it was painting, not caricature, that provided the ideal vehicle for him.

Transcribing nature onto canvas became an act of devotion. Like Thoreau writing of the daily trials of life on Walden Pond, Cranch also attempted, in his landscapes, to express the correspondence between nature and spiritual concepts. His brand of Transcendentalism bypasses the quiet, “transparent” aspect to celebrate a nature that is filled with the flux and continual shifting that Emerson and Thoreau also celebrated in their writings. C. P. Cranch was intimate with some of the most innovative thinkers in America and counted among his friends Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George William Curtis, and James Russell Lowell. This study considers Cranch not only as a Hudson River School artist, but also as a participant in the history of ideas, a multi-faceted individual who merged intellectual and artistic life.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 208-page exhibition catalogue; At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813 – 1892). The Foreword is written by Barbara Novak, Professor Emerita at Columbia University, one of the most influential theorists on American art. Nancy Stula, Curator and Deputy Director of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, and David M. Robinson, Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Oregon State University authored the catalogue essays.

At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch. Is part of the ongoing celebration during 2007 marking the museum’s 75^th anniversary. Thanks to the generosity of benefactor Harriet Upson Allyn, Lyman Allyn Art Museum opened in 1932 as a place for local citizens to learn about art and culture. The museum has always made part of its mission to respond and to appeal to the regional community.

Lyman Allyn Art Museum is a community-based museum located in New London, Connecticut. Founded in 1932 by Harriet Upson Allyn in memory of her father, Lyman Allyn, the Museum serves the people of Southeastern Connecticut and is free to the residents of New London. The Museum is accredited by the American Association of Museums and is a non-profit organization with 501(c) 3 status. Housed in a handsome Neo-Classical building designed by Charles A. Platt, the permanent collection includes over 10,000 paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, furniture and decorative arts, with an emphasis on American art from the 18^th through 20^th centuries.

In that spirit, Lyman Allyn Art Museum has planned an exciting schedule of programs to accompany the exhibition. The programs are designed to appeal to and to engage people of all ages and to make the humanities themes of the exhibition easily accessible.

For more information on any of the many events and programs at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, please visit our website at : www.lymanallyn.org .