|
Expanded International Tour for Putnam County Historical Society Painting
John Ferguson Weir's The Gun Foundry travels to Russia and Spain
 | | While the 'Gun Foundry' painting is away on tour, some of the Society's lesser-known paintings will hang in exhibition |
|
One of the most dramatic of all Hudson River School paintings, John Ferguson Weir's The Gun Foundry made its Russian debut at The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow on July 23, 2007.
The painting is owned by the Putnam County Historical Society (PCHS) and has been loaned to the traveling exhibition Art in America: Three Hundred Years of Innovation, organized by the Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition has previously been on view in Shanghai and Beijing; the tour was recently extended to include Moscow and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
While the expanded schedule will delay the return of The Gun Foundry to its home at PCHS's Foundry School Museum - a short walk form the nineteenth-century West Point Foundry depicted in the painting - it means the picture will be seen by thousands of museum goers in Europe and Asia as well as the United States.
Filling in for The Gun Foundry at the Foundry School Museum is a new exhibition of rarely seen Hudson River School paintings from several local private collections. This Perfect River-View: The Hudson River School and Contemporaries in Private Collections in the Highlands features some 40 paintings from 10 local private collections. Landscape paintings by both John Ferguson Weir and his father Robert Walter is represented along with other Hudson River School artists including Edmund C. Coates, George Loring Brown, and Regis Gignoux. Most of the works have never been on public view.
The exhibition will continue through November 25, 2007, at the museum, 63 Chestnut Street, Cold Spring. Hours are 11 to 5, Wednesday through Sunday.
| 
)
