Heritage of American Art
Paintings from the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Free entry
NGV International
Ground Level
30 Mar 77 – 8 May 77
Surveying 200 years of art in the United States, this was the largest exhibition of American painting to travel to Australia at the time. All 100 works were loaned from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and had previously toured the US while the gallery renovated the wing that housed them. As The Bulletin noted in a review of the exhibition, ‘When completed, paintings as important as these are unlikely to leave New York again’.
The earliest paintings were two portraits painted in 1729 by John Smibert, who is credited as organising the first known art exhibition in the US, in 1730. It also included work by Mary Cassatt, John Singelton Copley, Arthur B. Davies, Thomas Eakins, Erastus Field, William Harnett, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, Walt Kuhn, James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Moran, Alexander Pope, John Frederick Peto and Frederic Remington.
The NGV also held a series of well-attended lectures in conjunction with the exhibition.