Reflections
Paintings of Florida
1865-1965
“Since Bartram’s time, the romantic spirit has been a vital part of the South’s self-image. Florida remains Southern in its romanticism and its faith in nature and renewal… The landscape and genre paintings of the Brown Collection, express the vital relationship between a land and its people, with a spirit of imagination and optimism that remains classically Southern.” from the essay “Local Color: Florida as a Southern Place” by Jay Williams, Curator of Art, Morris Museum of Art.
Reflections:100 Years of Florida Painting 1865- 1965 illustrates in full color a generous selection of important paintings, many new to the field of scholarship, by some of the most significant artists who worked in the Sunshine State between 1864 and 1964. The book contains an essay entitled “Local Color: Florida as a Southern Place” by Jay Williams, Curator of Art at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia. Here Williams helps to explain the flowering of fine art in the South and the unique place that Florida played in that development. David Swoyer, guest curator for the publication, contributes an essay entitled “Floridaness: Finding the State in the Art.” Swoyer carefully explains how artists used pictorial elements of the man-built and natural Florida environment in their paintings to help geographically locate the subject of each work while also adding a poetic layer of meaning to each artist’s finished product. Essays by Gary R. Libby on each artist represented in this book present a current and authoritative biographical, historical, cultural and aesthetic analysis of each work designed to help the reader appreciate these important cultural objects in context. An essay “The Collectors” explores the creation and maturation of a world-class collection of Florida paintings and the individuals and events that helped to shape the collection of Cici and Hyatt Brown, which now numbers well over 1,500 items and contains some of the most important known paintings of Florida, many new to the fields of scholarship and connoisseurship.
184 pages
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This item will not ship until November 21, 2009 or as soon as it becomes available.