American Art from the Permanent Collection

In the early decades of the 20th century, the Museum’s distinguished collection of American art was presented to visitors in elegantly proportioned galleries made possible by a gift from Jesse Metcalf in memory of his wife, Helen. Inaugurated in 1897, the Beaux Arts-style Waterman Galleries now link visitors to the Daphne Farago Wing, to Pendleton House by way of the Porcelain Gallery, and to the 1926 Radeke Building. The rooms also offer a direct sightline through the Museum’s new 20th-century galleries, and beyond that to The Chace Center. Two of the Waterman galleries are now reinstalled with highlights of American art from the permanent collection. On view are landscapes acquired in the Museum’s early years of collecting, including Thomas Cole’s sublime Landscape (1828), Winslow Homer’s magnificent On a Lee Shore (1900), and George Bellows’s Rain on the River (1908). John Singer Sargent’s A Boating Party (ca. 1889), Theodore Robinson’s Afternoon Shadows (1891), and Frank W. Benson’s Summer (1909) are among the selections from the Museum’s renowned collection of American Impressionist paintings.