The Hyde Collection Hosts Thomas Eakins' Portrait

Wednesday, 26 July 2006 10:42

Glenn Falls, NY - The Hyde Collection is pleased to exhibit the exquisite portrait Elizabeth at the Piano (1875) by the American artist Thomas Eakins as part of the Museum’s exhibition American Portraiture from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.  This sensitive early portrait of Eakins’s young sister–in-law Elizabeth Crowell (1858-1929) was among the artist’s favorite works.  A large-scale portrait, it represents the culmination of a series of works depicting female family members at the piano executed by Eakins in the early 1870s.  The painting is on loan from the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts in exchange for the Hyde’s Portrait of Henry O. Tanner (1897), also by Eakins.  The Portrait of Henry O. Tanner is presently featured in the traveling exhibition Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century that is organized by the Addison Gallery.

The opportunity to display Elizabeth at the Piano inspired the exhibition of other American portraits from the Museum’s permanent collection as well as works on loan.  Together, the portraits on view present a range of styles and techniques from the primitivism of American folk art portraiture to the abstraction of Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s A Friend. 

The exhibition also brings together two remarkable Hyde family portraits, one of Mary Van Ness Hyde (daughter of Museum founders Louis and Charlotte Hyde), by Edmund Charles Tarbell commissioned in 1909.  The other, a portrait of Samuel and Polly Hoopes (the Hyde’s niece and nephew) by Alice Ruggles from 1910, was recently acquired by the Museum.  Additional portraits from the permanent collection by George Bellows, Frank Duveneck, as well as a portrait study by Eakins are featured.  The exhibition also includes a loan of an early portrait of Benjamin Townsend Underhill by William Sydney Mount, a Long Island artist better known as a painter of rural American scenes. It is among a handful of portraits that Mount painted during the early 1840s.

American Portriature will be on view at The Hyde Collection, from July 30 through December 3, 2006.  This exhibition is organized by Hyde curator, Erin Coe.

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