Image: Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting ‘New Eyes: American Landscape Drawings’, an ongoing exhibition examining how artists represented the American landscape between 1840 and 1940. The exhibition is on view in the Korman Galleries 221–223 at the museum’s Main Building and is listed by the museum as continuing through Fall 2026. Admission is free with museum admission.
Organized in connection with the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, ‘New Eyes’ is presented alongside the nearby exhibition ‘A Nation of Artists’. Its title draws on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay ‘Nature’, in which the philosopher and poet called for a distinctive American artistic spirit rooted in the country’s natural surroundings. Emerson’s phrase “to look at the world with new eyes” provides the exhibition’s conceptual framework.
The exhibition focuses on the long-standing importance of landscape to American art while emphasizing the range of ways artists approached the subject. According to the museum, the works reveal the diversity of American terrain as well as the different cultural backgrounds and visual traditions brought to its representation. The presentation also considers the artistic, cultural and spiritual impulses that drew artists outdoors to record fleeting impressions of the landscape.
Drawn from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s works on paper collection, the display includes rarely seen watercolors and drawings. The selection spans a broad range of subjects and styles, moving from rural and wooded settings to more atmospheric and expressive interpretations of place. The museum describes the works as capturing the “vital energies” of artists responding directly to the landscape.
Among the artists represented are Grant Wood, Edward Mitchell Bannister, Mason W. Zimmerman, Rockwell Kent, Charles Lewis Fussell, Ellen Robbins, George Grosz, John Singer Sargent and Alice Schille. Featured works include Wood’s ‘Plow’ from 1936, Bannister’s ‘Landscape (Path with Two Figures)’ from around 1881–83, Zimmerman’s ‘A Lakeside Spruce’ from 1920 and Kent’s ‘Harvest’ from 1926. The selection also includes Robbins’s ‘Autumn Leaves’, Fussell’s ‘On Ridley Creek’, Grosz’s ‘Red Sun’, Sargent’s ‘Dublin Lake’ and Schille’s ‘Bow Spirit’.
Bannister, identified by the museum as American and born in Canada, is represented by a work acquired with the Elizabeth Moran Endowment for American Art. Other artists in the exhibition include Sargent, described as American and active in London, Florence and Paris, and Grosz, identified as American and born in Germany. The exhibition’s curatorial team comprises Em Dombrovskaya, Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow; Laurel Garber, Park Family Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings; Heather Hughes, Kathy and Ted Fernberger Associate Curator of Prints; and Nora Rosengarten, Dorothy del Bueno Curatorial Fellow. ‘New Eyes: American Landscape Drawings’ remains on view in the Main Building’s Korman Galleries through Fall 2026.
