About this item
Inspired by European impressionist paintings of open countryside, private gardens, and urban parks, American artists working in the years between 1887 and 1920 turned their attentions to the new landscapes being created in the fast-changing cities and rapidly emerging suburbs of their own country. Up and down the eastern seaboard, a middle-class idyll was brought to life with the construction of railways, trams, and parkways that connected city centers to commuter suburbs, whose inhabitants increasingly turned to gardening as a leisure - and predominantly female - pursuit. "The two arts of painting and garden design are closely related," landscape architect Beatrix Farrand wrote in 1907, "except that the landscape gardener paints with actual color, line, and perspective to make a composition .
About the Author
Anna O. Marley is Curator of Historical American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Marley 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.
At PAFA, Marley has curated the exhibition Public Treasures/Private Visions: Hudson River School Masterworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Private Collections (2009-2010) Virgins, Soldiers, Angels, and Saints: Violet Oakley's Religious Art from the PAFA Collection (2010) and co-curated, with her colleagues Robert Cozzolino and Julien Robson, Anatomy/Academy (2011) an exhibition that focused on how Philadelphia's dynamic art and science communities have fostered knowledge of the human body. In 2012 Marley curated "A Mine of Beauty": Landscapes by William Trost Richards, editing the accompanying catalog, as well as the touring retrospective Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit (2012) , and editing the acclaimed accompanying catalog, published by the University of California Press. In 2013, Marley co-curated Modern Women at PAFA: From Cassatt to O'Keeffe and Hidden Treasures Unveiled: Watercolors. Marley's recent exhibitions at PAFA include Spiritual Strivings: A Celebration of African American Works on Paper (2014) . In 2015, she is curating the touring exhibition, The Artist's Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887-1920 and is editor of the accompanying catalog published by University of Pennsylvania Press. She is working on future exhibits on Thomas Eakins's photography and 19th-century history painting in the Americas.
Marley's professional affiliations include serving as Chair of the Association of Historians of American Art, and member of the Association of Art Museum Curators, College Art Association, and the Society of Early Americanists.
