8:00 - 9:00 am
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Continental Breakfast, Bookout Reception Hall |
9:00 - 10:00 am
Rubenstein Leadership Hall
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Colonial Upstarts or Harbingers of a New World to Come?: Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley
Emily Ballew Neff

Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe (1770), courtesy of National Gallery of Ottawa. The trio at left, including a Scottish Highlander, colonial ranger, and member of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), assert the promise of a new America through its co-mingling of cultures.
In the world of art, no one embodied the promise of America more than painters Benjamin West (1738-1820) and John Singleton Copley (1738-1815). When they embarked on their careers, London was their capital and both aspired—and succeeded brilliantly—in attracting the attention of the most important figures in the London art world, even becoming, in time, the leading figures of that very world: West served as the second and longest-running President of the Royal Academy, and Copley sensationally reimagined history painting as it had been previously understood in the world of art. Neff will examine the two paintings that catapulted these artists to international fame: West’s The Death of General Wolfe and Copley’s Watson and the Shark. She will show how both paintings put on display a new world of American promise, as well as ambivalence, in theatrical paintings that romanticized current events and captured the imagination of the public.
EMILY BALLEW NEFF is Executive Director of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. She has organized many exhibitions, including the critically-admired American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World, and written several publications on the subject of colonial American art, and painting and photography of the American West. For two decades, Neff served as the first curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is also a former President of the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC). She received her BA from Yale University; her MA from Rice University; and her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin.
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10:00 - 10:15 am |
Break |
10:15 - 11:00 am
Rubenstein Leadership Hall
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From "1 Neat Landskip... for a Chimny" to views "worth a voiage across the Atlantic": Landscape Representation in George Washington's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello
Anna O. Marley
George Washington installed this "Neat Landskip" (after Claude Lorrain) in the Mansion's west parlor in 1757.
Marley will examine the deployment of landscape painting in the homes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in order to illustrate the changing nature of landscape consumption from the colonial to early national period. The talk will begin with Washington's 1757 commission for a "neat landskip" for his best room, continue to the addition of the large dining room at Mount Vernon in the 1780s, and conclude with Jefferson's dining room upon his retirement to Monticello in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The home in the long eighteenth-century was a place of business, entertainment, and reception, and since the landscape paintings hung not in private rooms such as back parlors or bed chambers, but rather in the most visible of places in domestic interiors, parlors and dining rooms, they must be read in terms of these public functions. By examining the changes in two, very significant, houses over 30 years one can see how landscape aesthetics mirror, as well as resist, the political transformation of colony to country.
ANNA O. MARLEY is the Curator of Historical American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She is a scholar of American art and material culture from the colonial era to 1945 and holds a BA in Art History from Vassar College, an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware, where she completed a dissertation on 18th- and early 19th-century landscape paintings and their display in international merchant’s domestic interiors.
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11:00 - 11:45 am
Rubenstein Leadership Hall
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The Country House in American Art
William L. Coleman

The Van Rensselaer Manor House, by Thomas Cole, courtesy of the Albany Institute of History & Art
Mount Vernon is surely the most frequently depicted country house in American art, but it is not alone. This symposium provides the ideal setting in which to take stock of the art of “house portraiture,” the depiction of country houses in their landscape settings, as it has been practiced on this side of the Atlantic. From tentative beginnings of an art steeped in British aristocratic contexts to its flowering in the hands of members of the so-called “Hudson River School,” house portraiture has played an important role in the development of an American tradition of landscape painting. Moreover, when artists like Charles Willson Peale, William Birch, and Thomas Cole designed and built country houses of their own, they put lessons learned from depicting the houses of others into practice and entered into dialogue with the influential houses of earlier artists and writers, both in the U.S. and abroad.
WILLIAM L. COLEMAN is a Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art at Washington University in St. Louis, where he curated the 2016 exhibition “Abodes of Plenty: American Art of the Inhabited Landscape.” He received his PhD from Berkeley in 2015 after master’s degrees from Oxford and the Courtauld Institute and a bachelor’s from Haverford. He is at work on a book called “Painting Houses: The Domestic Landscape of the Hudson River School.”
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12:00 - 2:00 pm
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Lunch, Founders' Terrace |
2:00 - 2:45 pm
Rubenstein Leadership Hall
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John Gadsby Chapman: Painting Virginia's Historical Legacy in the 1830s
Lydia Brandt and Adam Erby
Residence of George Washington's Mother in Fredericksburg, Virginia by Chapman, courtesy of Homeland Foundation, Inc.
After studying painting in Italy, a young John Gadsby Chapman returned to his native Virginia in 1831 with hopes to take the American art scene by storm. He immediately utilized his family connections and knowledge of the state to carve a position for himself in American history painting, resulting in the 1840 monumental “Baptism of Pocahontas” for the Capitol rotunda. Although critics panned the work and today’s art historians usually dismiss Chapman, his images of Virginia played a crucial role in establishing an iconography of the Republic and the memory of George Washington.
Through a reevaluation of Chapman’s training, oeuvre, and network, this paper will reevaluate the artist’s enterprising combination of history and landscape painting. It will examine the creative ways Chapman took advantage of the burgeoning markets for popular printed images and biographies, and how it resulted in new images and memories of early Virginia, Washington, Mount Vernon, and the quickly disappearing Revolutionary generation.
LYDIA MATTICE BRANDT, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches the history of American art and architecture and the theories and methods of historic preservation. The University of Virginia Press will publish her book, First in the Homes of His Countrymen: George Washington’s Mount Vernon in the American Imagination, in fall 2016.
ADAM T. ERBY is associate curator at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, where he is responsible for both special exhibitions and historic interiors. He was a major contributor to the recent conservation of the Mansion’s “New Room,” and he curated the special exhibition Gardens & Groves: George Washington’s Landscape at Mount Vernon. He is the principal author of the recently released book The General in the Garden: George Washington’s Landscape at Mount Vernon.
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2:45 - 3:30 pm
Rubenstein Leadership Hall
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"Anything Worth Looking Up": Edward Lamson Henry and American Architecture
Amy Kurtz Lansing
Edward Lamson Henry's Drafting the Letter (1871) depicts an incident from the American Revolution set in the artist's recreation of a room at Graeme Park, in suburban Philadelphia. Courtesy, Private Collection
Painting in the decades following the Civil War and surrounding the Centennial, Edward Lamson Henry (1841–1919) crafted genre scenes that gave visual form to the American colonial and federal eras. An unsung figure in the nascent field of historic preservation, Henry described his “stock in trade” as that of an antiquary who documented and collected relics of historic buildings, interiors, furnishings, and costumes. With these tools at his disposal, he composed pictorial vignettes that recreate historical moments within the settings where they occurred, from Cliveden and Graeme Park near Philadelphia, to John Hancock’s Boston house and William Byrd’s Westover estate in Virginia. This presentation explores the complex intersection of fact and fiction in these works, as the artist and his audience struggled to define postbellum America through the medium of the nation’s history.
AMY KURTZ LANSING is Curator at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, home of an early-20th-century Impressionist art colony based in the historic 1817 mansion of Florence Griswold. She is the author of several publications about nineteenth and twentieth-century American art. As a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, she organized the exhibition Historical Fictions: Edward Lamson Henry’s Paintings of Past and Present, which appeared at the Yale University Art Gallery and the New-York Historical Society.
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4:00 - 7:30 pm |
Behind-the-Scenes Tours, Mansion Tours, and Piazza Reception |
8:00 - 10:00 pm
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Dinner, Ford Orientation Center |