From today through November 6, the Arthur Ross gallery at the University of Pennsylvania's Furness Building, will be displaying "An American Odyssey: The Warner Collection of American Art." I've been talking of late about the dismantling of the extraordinary collection that Jack Warner assembled over a lifetime of collecting — including the sale of Asher Durand's important antebellum landscape Progress. This was particularly shocking news to me, because Progress occupies an important place in my work on pre-Civil War legal thought.
The "American Odyssey" exhibit has work from Mr. Warner's personal collection, which was not liable to sale, including Thomas Cole's Catskill Mountain House. I have not written much, if anything about it here, but it's a wonderful landscape of a hotel in the middle of the Catskills. Quite an odd juxta-position of a Greek Revival Structure in the mountains. The hotel itself is worth some commentary — decades later (in the mid-twentieth century) it was in dis-repair and it was intentionally burned in 1983, so says wikipedia.
I hope to take the exhibit in sometime this fall when I'm in Philadelphia. It will be wonderful to see some old friends from Tuscaloosa in a setting that once meant so much to me, on Penn's campus.
The image is of the Furness Building.