Gertrude KÄsebier, Mother and Child, c. 1900, multiple gum dichromate print

Gertrude Käsebier's Mother and Child is among thirty-five stellar works by photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz's famed Photo-Secession recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art.

In the early 1900s Stieglitz formed a group he called the Photo-Secession that brought together several photographers whose work he believed represented the finest examples of the art of photography. Members included Käsebier as well as such now-celebrated photographers as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Karl Struss, and Clarence H. White. A fierce promoter of photography's artistic merit, Stieglitz founded a Photo-Secession gallery in New York and reproduced the group's photographs in his lavish journal Camera Work.

The Photo-Secession rebelled against the clear-eyed, often more pragmatic or topographic approach of many 19th-century photographers. Eager to prove that photography was capable of artistic expression, the Photo-Secessionists instead produced images that were more suggestive than explicit, more evocative of moods or feelings than bald descriptions of fact.

Käsebier, the most successful American portrait photographer in the first decade of the 20th century, was a founding member of the Photo-Secession. In addition to her innovative portraiture, such as the Gallery's 1902 photograph of Alfred Stieglitz, she often used photography to convey her feelings about childhood and what she called "the tremendous import of motherhood." A staunch believer in recent educational theories that urged adults to foster children's intellectual growth and independence starting at infancy, Käsebier frequently depicted—as she does here—a mother in the delicate position of simultaneously protecting a child and encouraging his or her exploration of the world.

Mother and Child also highlights Käsebier's extraordinary printing skills. The lush, soft-focus image has a painterly quality—at once velvety and ethereal—that derives from Käsebier's facility with manipulating the surface of her gum dichromate prints. By printing the negative successively on the same sheet, and varying the pigmented emulsions, she was able to produce an expressive, subtly colored image that seems to hover between painting and photography.

The newly acquired works by Käsebier, Coburn, Steichen, Struss, and White complement the Gallery's unparalleled collection of Stieglitz photographs. Together these images showcase the birth of the movement dedicated to advancing photography as a fine art.

Gertrude Käsebier, American, 1852–1934, Mother and Child, c. 1900, multiple gum dichromate print, overall: 27.94 x 17.78 cm (11 x 7 in.), Patrons' Permanent Fund, 2008.65.7

Norman Wilfred Lewis, Untitled (Alabama), 1967, oil on canvas

This painting approaches its subject obliquely. Although there is no official title on record, Lewis' widow reports that he called it Alabama. Its composition reflects and exaggerates the shape of that state, which is a tapering quadrilateral with a "handle" at Mobile, where the border reaches the Gulf. Consider its date, 1967, and the fact that the artist was African American, and a theme begins to emerge. The hood of a Klansman emerges from a welter of black and white strokes. The two large forms have a violence to them, both in the way they meet the edge of the picture and in the way they cut off the marks within them. Think of a meat cleaver or a guillotine.

Lewis' "black paintings" (1946–1977) were shown in 1998 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Untitled (Alabama) is the culmination of a subseries that includes American Totem (1960), Ku Klux (1963), and Processional (1964). In these works, compacted, flamelike strokes of white and black move and twist across the canvas, suggesting the ambulatory confrontations that punctuated the Civil Rights struggle. In Alabama in 1963, Martin Luther King was jailed, "Bull" Connor turned dogs and hoses on demonstrators, and four black girls were killed at a Baptist church.

As the sixties wore on and the Civil Rights and antiwar movements became more militant, artists increasingly turned to politics, such as in Barnett Newman's sculpture Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley (1968), with its barbed wire, and in Philip Guston's painting Courtroom (1970), with its Klansman and accusing finger. Lewis rarely resorted to such literal images, yet he had been working at the intersection of politics and art for years.

The wedgelike walls of Untitled (Alabama) reflect the geometric abstractions of the time—and the forms within them recall the gestural painting of the 1950s, particularly the work of Bradley Walker Tomlin and Mark Tobey—but they also foreshadow the work of Richard Serra and Maya Lin, two artists also concerned with the politics of human locomotion.

Lewis is often described as the main African American member of the abstract expressionist circle. This designation fails to capture his desire to reconcile abstraction with an urgent subject. Lewis may have disclaimed political efficacy for his art, but Untitled (Alabama), one of his greatest works, is unique in its historical ambition. It is the first work by the artist to enter the collection.

Norman Wilfred Lewis, American, 1909–1979, Untitled (Alabama), 1967, oil on canvas, overall: 114.9 x 186.7 cm (45 1/4 x 73 1/2 in.) Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2009.45.1

Byron Kim, Synecdoche, 1991–present, oil and wax on wood

Synecdoche (1991–present), by Korean-American artist Byron Kim (b. 1961), is an ongoing project of portraiture that now comprises more than 400 panels, each a single hue ranging from light tan or pink to dark brown. Finding sitters among strangers, friends, family, neighbors, and fellow artists, Kim records each person's skin color in oil paint mixed with wax that he applies with a palette knife on a single 10 x 8-inch panel, a common size for portrait photography. When the work is installed, the accompanying subtitle consists of the full names of the sitters, arranged alphabetically by first name.

Synecdoche was a watershed for the artist and has received much acclaim since its first showing in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Subsequent iterations have been seen in installations and exhibitions around the world. The work can be installed in many ways, using some or all of the panels, in a grid of almost any size or shape.

Kim's work explores the history of abstract painting, the problems of color and vision, and issues of human identity and existence. The title—referring to a figure of speech in which a part represents the whole or vice versa—makes clear that issues of representation, both visual and democratic, are in play.

www.nga.gov/pdf/synedoche.pdf (reference key: sitter names) (PDF 1.13MB)

Byron Kim, American, born 1961, Synecdoche, 1991–present, Richard S. Zeisler Fund, 2009.39.1.1-429

Nathan Hale, model 1889/1890, cast 1890

American beaux-arts sculpture gained new prominence with a gift from the Wolf family, a representation of an iconic figure from early American history, Nathan Hale. The Gallery's first work by Frederick William MacMonnies (1863–1937), a star pupil of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, is a moving bronze image of the young martyr of the American Revolution. It was given by Erving and Joyce Wolf in memory of their daughter, the Honorable Diane R.Wolf, who had kept it in her home in Washington. MacMonnies had won the commission for an eight-foot-tall statue of Hale (1755–1776) in a competition sponsored by the Sons of the Revolution in the state of New York. That group planned the monument that now stands in City Hall Park, New York, then believed to be the site of Hale's execution. The competition model, produced in Paris, won MacMonnies a medal at the Paris Salon of 1891, the first such award given to an American sculptor. Cast at the Gruet Foundry in Paris, this bronze is an exceptionally fine example of the sought-after reductions produced from the sculptor's model.

Hale, a young schoolmaster, was hanged as a spy by the British on September 22, 1776, reportedly after declaring, "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." Without any portrait for guidance, instructions to the artists competing to create his image a hundred years later called for "a well-built young man of American type, dressed in simple costume of the end of the last Century—at the moment immediately preceding his execution by the British" (M. Smart, A Flight with Fame: The Life and Art of Frederick MacMonnies [1996], 86). MacMonnies made effective use of eighteenth-century costume details such as the ruffled shirt, whose torn and displaced neckline underlines the figure's fragility. Bound by ropes around his ankles and arms, his Hale stands erect, turning his face to the side as he confronts death with pensive self-possession, his fingers probing the air. The image shows both kinship and contrast with another celebrated monument to patriotic sacrifice, represented by a bust and bronze statuette nearby in the Ground Floor Sculpture Galleries—Auguste Rodin's Burghers of Calais, modeled 1884–1889, just before MacMonnies began to design his Nathan Hale. Both sculptors explore their subjects' states of mind at the moment before expected execution. Hale was hanged, but Edward spared the lives of the citizens of Calais.

Frederick William MacMonnies, Nathan Hale, model 1889/1890, cast 1890, Gift of Erving and Joyce Wolf in memory of Diane R. Wolf, 2008.101.1

David Triumphant, model 1845/1846, carved 1848

American sculpture in the classical and beaux-arts traditions gained new importance in our West Building galleries with a splendid gift in 2008. Ian and Annette Cumming presented the Gallery with its earliest example of American sculpture, a unique work of marble and bronze, David Triumphant by Thomas Crawford (1814–1857). Crawford's most familiar work in Washington is the bronze statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome, posthumously cast from his model. The artist, a pioneer of neoclassicism in this country, is the only known American pupil of Bertel Thorvaldsen, the Danish rival of the celebrated Italian neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova. Crawford began to design this David around 1845, and the present version, carved for a "Miss Pickman" whose family kept it until the late twentieth century, was completed in Rome in 1848.

In his image of the boy conqueror of Goliath, Crawford addressed the challenge of the Italian Renaissance; the subject was famous in versions by Donatello, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo. His young David, portrayed with neoclassical calm in a Grecian-style tunic, takes a pose that recalls not only Renaissance bronze statuettes but also an ancient statue, surviving at the Capitoline Museums in Rome, that later became central to Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Marble Faun. David's identity as a sweet singer and future psalmist, not explored in the Florentine Renaissance statues, is evoked here by the harp, for which the sculptor used an innovative combination of bronze and marble. He ingeniously encouraged alternative main viewpoints, setting both the oval shield on which David stands and the face of Goliath in a position diagonally crossing the square plinth that bears the signature inscription on its front. One writer asserts that four examples of Crawford's David were carved, a level of replication that was customary for nineteenth-century sculpture. So far, the 2008 gift to the National Gallery of Art is the only example that has come to light.

Thomas Crawford, David Triumphant, model 1845/1846, carved 1848, Gift of Ian and Annette Cumming, 2008.93.1

Fresh Widow, original 1920, fabricated 1964

In 1913, following his early experiments with cubism, Marcel Duchamp sought to expose and undermine some of the basic assumptions that informed traditional approaches to painting and sculpture. Fascinated by the mass production of commercial goods in America, Duchamp began to appropriate prosaic, manufactured objects for his "readymades." He often shocked viewers by showing commonplace utilitarian items, such as snow shovels and urinals, bought directly from stores and usually unaltered except for the addition of a signature, in public exhibitions. By challenging standard notions of what constitutes art, these revolutionary works heralded a more conceptual approach to art-making in the twentieth century.

Duchamp produced Fresh Widow in the summer or late fall of 1920, after returning to New York City from Buenos Aires via Paris. The title, a pun formed by changing several letters in the words "French" and "Window," refers to the double windows common in Parisian apartments and to the recent widows of World War I. The sheathing of polished black Morocco leather in place of windowpanes may also allude to the dark veils worn by women in mourning.

Fresh Widow is a variation on the idea of the readymade as a commercial object, selected with indifference and transformed into a work of art by the application of a signature. Duchamp did not simply purchase an actual French window, but instead arranged to have a small-scale version produced to his specifications by a carpenter in New York. Further complicating matters, Fresh Widow was the first work Duchamp signed as Rose Sélavy (later written Rrose Sélavy), the quick-witted, bawdy female alter ego he adopted in 1920. While working under this pseudonym, Duchamp produced numerous works with verbal and visual puns, such as Brawl at Austerlitz, 1921, another small-scale window whose title cleverly alludes to the Parisian train station Gare d'Austerlitz and the battle during the Napoleonic wars that the station commemorates. Clearly Duchamp saw every aspect of his work—materials, subject matter, name of the work, his own name—as a means to jolt the viewer into confronting the question "What constitutes a work of art?"

Duchamp's original version of Fresh Widow is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Under Duchamp's supervision, the Milanese dealer Arturo Schwarz made several authorized reproductions of Fresh Widow in 1964, using photographs and descriptions of the original. Eight sculptures are in the edition, identical in size. The Gallery's version (inscribed ex. Arturo and dedicated to Schwartz) is one of two additional artist's proofs that Duchamp produced, with the other copy (inscribed ex. Rrose) reserved for himself. Two further replicas, also outside the edition, were made for museum exhibition purposes. Because Duchamp hand-painted a copyright notice on the work in 1920, thus legally protecting it as a unique intellectual property, it is reasonable to assume that he always had in mind the possibility of such future copies and editions.

This will be the second work by Duchamp to enter the Gallery's permanent collection. The first, Bôite-en-Valise, 1961, is a cloth-covered case containing miniature reproductions of works by Duchamp, including Fresh Widow. In addition to strengthening the Gallery's holdings of works by Duchamp and his brothers, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, Fresh Widow will complement other works by Dada and surrealist artists such as Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Joseph Cornell, Jean Arp, and Kurt Schwitters.

Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Widow, original 1920, fabricated 1964, painted wood, glass, black leather, paper, and transparent tape, Gift of Deborah and Ed Shein, 2008.33.1

Wind from the Sea, 1947

Throughout his six-decade-long career, Andrew Wyeth painted lonely rural landscapes, closely observed portraits, and crisp interior still lifes in a characteristically realistic and finely detailed style. His landscapes are almost entirely of locations in the Chadds Ford and Brandywine area of Pennsylvania and in coastal Maine, the places where he grew up and lived all his life. Wyeth's close friends and neighbors, and their homes, were frequently the subjects of his intensely personal paintings. The Olsons—Christina Olson in particular, shown in his most famous painting, Christina's World, 1948 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)—and their farm were repeatedly depicted by the artist. Wyeth's interior scenes and architectural views often focus on windows and doorways, and Wind from the Sea is one of the artist's earliest paintings of a window. It is a scene from a room on the top floor of the Olson house in Maine, looking over the surrounding landscape.

Wind from the Sea, painted a year before Christina's World, captures a moment on a hot summer day when Wyeth opened the seldom used window in an attic room. The picture is eerily alive with movement as the wind blows the curtains into the room. The tattered, transparent fabric is light and airy, with small embroidered birds along the edges that seem ready to dart into the house. In contrast, the sun-bleached wooden window sill looks sturdy and solid. The interior of the room is dim, while the landscape beyond the open window is stark and bright. The tree-lined view includes no figures, but as in so many other works by Wyeth, a strong sense of their presence is evident. Two well-worn tire tracks running across the dirt lead the viewer's eye toward the sea in the distance. The close vantage point and the tightly cropped window frame at the edge of the painting create the illusion that the viewer is actually looking out a window.

Wind from the Sea is an iconic example of Wyeth's landscapes, as well as one of the earliest examples of his use of windows and his often unique choice of vantage point. Three preparatory studies for the painting accompanied the gift. All four works were bequeathed to the Gallery by Charles H. Morgan. Wind from the Sea is the second painting by Wyeth to enter the National Gallery's collection; Snow Flurries, a 1953 tempera painting, was given in 1977.

Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea, 1947, tempera on hardboard, Gift of Charles H. Morgan, 2009.13.1

Bagpipe Player, 1624

Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629), as no other Dutch artist, could capture the rhythms of music in the very way he composed his paintings. His musicians lean into their instruments, their bodies alive with the joy of the sounds they bring forth, whether coaxed from a violin, lute, recorder, or bagpipe. In this remarkable image a bagpipe player, seen in strict profile, squeezes the leather bag between his forearms as he blows through the instrument's pipe and fingers a tune on the chanter. Two large drones, composed of different wooden sections, rest on his bare shoulder. The interlocking rhythms of this ensemble—the round shapes of the musician's shoulder, beret, and brown bagpipe bag, the flowing patterns of folds in his creamy shirt and taupe robe, the pronounced diagonals of the drones and pipe, and the verticality of the chanter—parallel those of a musical score. One can almost imagine hearing the bagpipes' broad, fulsome notes, followed by quickly cadenced flourishes and strong beats that not only punctuate melodies with dynamic accents but also culminate in a well-defined and emphatic finale.

Ter Brugghen's painting, while muted in tonality, is both bold and forceful in its scale and painting techniques. The musician is shown larger than life-size and his form fills the picture plane. The artist's sure brushstrokes flow across the canvas, reflecting in their energy the bagpipe player's passion for his music. The numerous adjustments the artist made in the folds of the shirt and robe, as well as in the shape of the bagpipes, indicate the freedom with which he approached his subject. Also astonishing is Ter Brugghen's control of light, which falls most strongly on the bagpipe player's shoulder, shirt, and fingers while leaving his face in shadow—evidence that the painting focuses primarily on the sensuality of music and not on a specific individual.

The bagpipe player is a muscular, rough-hewn type, hardly an ideal of grace and refinement. His head is large, his nose round, and he sports a shepherd's mustache and beard. His hands and knuckles are thick, yet from the manner in which he fingers the chanter, leaving the vent hole uncovered, it is clear that he understands how to play the instrument. Bagpipes were traditionally viewed as folk instruments, played by herdsmen and shepherds whiling away their time or at country dances. However, Ter Brugghen does not depict a local peasant or a shepherd the artist may have encountered on a foray into the countryside: shepherds did not play bagpipes with drones resting on a bare shoulder. The bagpiper's loosely draped robes reflect a manner of dress based on antique fashions (all'antica). This mode of dress alluded to an arcadian ideal of country existence that was popular in aristocratic and court circles and among the urban elite, particularly in Utrecht and The Hague. Essential to this mythology were not only the purity and bounty of country existence, but also the romantic ideals of love and beauty that derived from Renaissance literary and pictorial traditions.

The Bagpipe Player thus reflects the broad cultural interest in the pastoral during the early seventeenth century that evoked the idyllic pleasures of country living, particularly as experienced through music. Ter Brugghen fully embraced this theme in paintings of musicians and singers that capture both the joy and the sensuality of life. These remarkably engaging images invite us into a world where, through the artist's boldness of his brush and the rhythms of his forms, we feel the enduring power of music on the human spirit.

The specific character of the Bagpipe Player—a single, over-life-size musician, depicted against a plain grayish-ocher background—owes much to the influence of Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen, Dutch Caravaggist painters who returned to Utrecht from Rome in 1620. They brought with them stylistic and thematic predilections appropriate for expressing the sensuous, idealized concepts of arcadian subject matter that they adapted from paintings by Caravaggio and his followers, particularly Bartolomeo Manfredi. Ter Brugghen himself had undertaken a trip to Italy around 1608 after a short apprenticeship in Utrecht, possibly with the mannerist artist Abraham Bloemaert. Little in Ter Brugghen's early work, or even in his work after he returned to Utrecht in the fall of 1614 and joined the painter's guild, suggests that he fully embraced Caravaggio's bold, light-filled style of painting. Once Honthorst and Baburen returned in 1620, however, he quickly responded to the stylistic and thematic innovations of his younger contemporaries, whether depicting biblical, mythological, or genre scenes of figures playing musical instruments, a subject he continued to paint until his death in 1629. He may even have formed a workshop with Baburen.

In 1624, the date of the Bagpipe Player, Ter Brugghen fully turned his attention to the depiction of musicians. In that year he painted no fewer than five separate compositions devoted to music, featuring not only bagpipe players but also musicians—sometimes singing—who play the lute and the violin. He continued this interest in the years to follow. Just what prompted this change is not known, but the appeal of this subject was such that Ter Brugghen and/or his workshop made replicas of a number of these works, including the Bagpipe Player. This is the first work by one of the Utrecht Caravaggisti to enter the Gallery's collection.

Hendrick ter Brugghen, Bagpipe Player, 1624, oil on canvas, Paul Mellon Fund and Greg and Candy Fazakerley Fund 2009.24.1

A Quiet Day near Manchester, 1873

Alfred Thompson Bricher began his career as a painter of autumnal landscapes, but by the late 1860s he had become a specialist in seascapes. His favorite subjects were the beaches and headlands of the New England coast, and he excelled at depicting such scenes in calm weather and lit by serene, luminous skies. At his best, as in the radiant A Quiet Day near Manchester, he was capable of equaling the finest work of fellow marine painters John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and Martin Johnson Heade. A Quiet Day near Manchester, 1873, depicts a scene on the Massachusetts coast north of Boston and seems to have been particularly inspired by Kensett, who had died unexpectedly the year before. The mass of meticulously delineated rocks at the left side of the composition and the expansive sweep of sea and sky bring to mind works such as Kensett's late Beach near Beverly, also in the Gallery's collection. Although Bricher painted many pictures over the course of his long career (he continued working until his death in 1908), the superb A Quiet Day near Manchester is unsurpassed.

Alfred Thompson Bricher, A Quiet Day near Manchester, 1873, oil on canvas, Paul Mellon Fund, Avalon Fund, and Gift of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr. 2008.66.1

Bitumen, 1986

One of the leading artists of the post- Jasper Johns/Robert Rauschenberg generation, Terry Winters wields his brush with the kind of knowledge and conviction that make periodic talk of "the death of painting" seem empty. Bitumen, 1986, is a work from the first decade of his career, when Winters was exploring such basic natural processes as crystal formation, fungal growth, and (as in this canvas) cellular division—and when he was equally immersed in the natural history of painting itself.

Winters' training at New York City's High School of Art and Design and later at Pratt Institute left him curious about his medium, and he began grinding and making his own paints. Attracted to bitumen, a dark-colored paint made from coal tar, but aware that its use was responsible for the poor condition of many nineteenth-century paintings that exhibit blistering surfaces over time, he obtained a stable, modified version from the French firm of Lefranc & Bourgeois for use in this painting. On full display here is what Winters calls the "transparency and viscosity" of bitumen, which he extended with umbers and other earth colors. Thick, juicy modeling alternates with passages of almost aqueous translucency. The material itself seems to partake of the painting's theme of organic growth, which is appropriate given the carbon base of the titular pigment. The tabular array of the composition, on the other hand, with its forms laid out like specimens on a table, references the rational ordering schemes employed by naturalists as well as the splayed compositions of Johns and the later works of Philip Guston. Thus the painting proposes a meeting of nature and culture that is at the heart of Winters' work.

Since 1990 Winters has turned his gaze from organic motifs to the digital presentation of graphic information, appropriating and overlaying imagery to drive his interrelated practices of painting, drawing, and printmaking. In this respect he was one of the first painters to embrace cyberspace and postmodern information theory. Winters has held fast to traditional artistic media as the appropriate vehicle for these explorations, thus extending the viability and the possibilities of painting.

Bitumen is the first work by this innovative artist to enter the Gallery's collection. Its acquisition was made possible by a generous gift from the Richard S. Zeisler Fund. The addition of this early, but classic, Winters work will help the National Gallery tell the story of painting in the 1980s, when artists such as Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Brice Marden, and others proved the continuing vitality of expressive abstract painting.

Terry Winters, Bitumen, 1986, oil on linen, Richard S. Zeisler Fund, 2008.35.1

White Bread, 1964

James Rosenquist, considered one of the leaders of the pop art movement of the 1960s, created White Bread, 1964, during a pivotal period in the early years of his long career.

After studying art with Cameron Booth at the University of Minnesota, Rosenquist moved to New York City in 1955 on a scholarship from the Art Students League. His breakthrough came in 1960, when he quit his signpainting job and found a loft in Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, joining a group of young mavericks that included Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, and Jack Youngerman. Here Rosenquist gave up his previous abstract expressionist efforts and let his commercial experience invade his art. The result was a series of monumental paintings based on jagged collages of magazine images and views out his window.

White Bread is one of Rosenquist's best-known works from this period, but it is not typical. The scale is relatively modest compared to other works he created at the time, and the composition is not interrupted by the sharp divisions and overlaid images that usually emerged from his collage process. Instead, the divisions and overlaps are elegantly found in the subject itself—four slices of store-bought white bread, the topmost of which is receiving a coat of the world's yellowest butter (or, more likely, margarine), courtesy of a very ordinary stainless steel knife.

While commonly associated with pop art, Rosenquist never fit comfortably into the pop category, as this painting demonstrates. On the one hand, he generally eschewed brand names and logos, preferring more generalized commercial images. On the other, he dared to approach commercial illustration techniques even more closely than his pop cohorts, as can be seen in his efficient but careful rendering of the grooves in the knife and the gloss on the butter. At the same time, this work can be considered largely as an abstraction: the canvas is divided into simple shapes, and the use of the same yellow for both the spread and the background flattens the space, calling attention to the patterns formed by the bread crusts. In this regard, White Bread is similar to the radical simplicity, purity of shape, and sharp contours found in Ellsworth Kelly's color field paintings. Indeed, some commentators have detected Kelly's initials in the crusts. The possible influence of Roy Lichtenstein can also be seen in this work. In 1963, Lichtenstein painted Mustard on White, which shows a woman's hand delivering a bright yellow coating of mustard to a slice of white bread with a knife.

In sum, White Bread is a painting about culture and consumption made at a high point of American consumerism, but it is also a painting about painting, about the application of color to a support and its stunning visual results.

James Rosenquist, White Bread, 1964, oil on canvas, Richard S. Zeisler Fund, 2008.36.1

Alex Katz, Swamp Maple (4:30), 1968

Although best known for his figure paintings, often set in and around Manhattan, Alex Katz is equally a painter of Maine, where he has summered for decades. Swamp Maple (4:30), painted in Lincolnville, Maine, in 1968, is one of his largest landscapes in every sense—at once monumental and unstable, fast and slow, flat and deep, hard and soft, general and particular, observed and abstract.

Here Katz beautifully captures the glow of weak sun on leaf and water and the contrasting textures of soft grass and rough bark. A delicate craquelure on the tree trunk emerged during the course of painting, and Katz took advantage of it to convey the bark itself. His color choices, such as the tan sky and the white reflection of the black shore, are both memorable and puzzling, leaving the viewer to wonder whether it is 4:30 a.m. or p.m. The former is not out of the question: Katz has said that he wants to explore times that few people have seen, and in Lincolnville, the sun rises that early in the summer. In fact, Katz recalls that the painting was based on oil sketches he made in the afternoon, although the title leaves the time of day ambiguous.

The absence of a viewpoint or standpoint in Swamp Maple (4:30) is aided by radical cropping, a Katz trademark: "A lot of these paintings don't have much of a floor," he remarks slyly, and indeed, the handling of the grass suggests a plane slipping away. Space is deepened by aerial perspective, as seen in the depiction of the pale blue hills, and then drained by the color of the sky, which seems to sit on the surface of the painting, refusing to recede properly into space. The tree is not in the landscape so much as in front of it, perhaps even serving as a stand-in for the artist or the beholder.

Katz steered his own course throughout the 1960s, paying close attention to artists as diverse as Barnett Newman, James Rosenquist, Fairfield Porter, Roy Lichtenstein, and Al Held, a painter with whom he shared studio space in New York for much of the 1960s. Swamp Maple (4:30) rivals the scale of abstract expressionism, borrows the language of hard-edge abstraction, and navigates between the softness of plein-air painting and the slickness of pop art. This work, the most ambitious landscape that Katz had painted up to that point, beautifully realizes his goal of capturing an "overall light" in the "present tense." Although the Gallery's collection is rich with early works on paper by Katz, Swamp Maple (4:30) is the first of his paintings to enter the collection. Together with the new Rosenquist acquisition, it will help to represent American figurative art of the 1960s, which is often overlooked given the struggle at that time between late abstract expressionism and emerging pop and minimalism.

Alex Katz, Swamp Maple (4:30), 1968, oil on linen, Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2008.34.1

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Oberwesel

This transcendent view down the Rhine River from the hillside vineyards near Oberwesel, Germany, is a masterpiece by one of the great icons of British art, J. M.W. Turner. Executed in Turner's signature medium of watercolor, it encapsulates all the most admired qualities of the artist's works in that demanding technique. With its dazzling combination of light, color, and atmosphere, this piece not only marks the pinnacle of Turner's career as an artist but also bears eloquent witness to his stature as a supremely gifted and innovative watercolorist.

Turner traveled widely over the course of his career, both in England and abroad, filling sketchbooks with rapid pencil studies that later served as the inspiration for his watercolors. This view of Oberwesel, for example, was the direct result of a trip he made along the Rhine in 1839. Topographical accuracy was not his first concern here, for he repositioned such significant local monuments as the white Ochsturm (Ox Tower) at left and the Schönburg Castle in the middle distance at right to improve the composition, framing the sun-glazed view down the river in a manner intended to evoke the grand classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain (1604/1605–1682). Turner's transcription of nature is firmly rooted in reality, but his inimitable combination of radiant light and vaporous color imbues his vision of the river and the surrounding hills with an extraordinary sense of spirituality and cosmic grandeur. Enhancing that quality is the contrastingly more detailed and down-to-earth handling of the foreground, which is animated with figures and objects that could hardly be more ordinary. Even in those more mundane passages, however, Turner's handling is very fine; particularly beautiful is his deft use of scratching out to indicate the grapevines trailing down the hill at right.

From his many journeys and his extensive reading, Turner was steeped in historical and literary knowledge about the places he visited and drew. He must have been well aware, for example, that in 1813 field marshal Blücher led his Prussian troops across the Rhine below Oberwesel—at the distant spot that lies exactly in the center of Turner's composition—to drive Napoleon's army out of the Rhineland. That is one reason the artist may have chosen to populate the foreground of his composition with laborers and their families resting in the midday sun, thus contrasting their present tranquil existence with the ravages of war in the past. Turner also undoubtedly knew Lord Byron's many verses in praise of the Rhine in Canto III of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and it has been suggested that he was specifically inspired by verse 46 to include nursing mothers and babes-in-arms among the foreground figures: "Maternal Nature! For who teems like thee, / Thus on the banks of thy majestic Rhine?"

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Oberwesel, 1840, Paul Mellon Fund, 2007.77.1

John Ward of Hull, The Northern Whale Fishery: the "Swan" and "Isabella"

The city of Hull, an important British port for commercial and fishing fleets, was a center for whaling until the middle of the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it attracted a number of accomplished marine painters. John Ward (1798–1849), one of the finest of these artists, enjoyed wide patronage from ship owners and merchants and produced numerous ship portraits and harbor views. His most original and striking works are whaling scenes he painted from the early 1820s to the early 1840s. He began exhibiting such works at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Royal Society of British Artists in London in the 1830s, bringing him recognition beyond his hometown.

The Northern Whale Fishery: The "Swan" and "Isabella" was unknown to modern scholarship on Ward until its appearance at auction in September 2006. Several other similar paintings of the Swan and the Isabella are extant, each with variations in the placement of the ships, the details of human activity, and the variety of marine animals shown. The Gallery's newly acquired picture is among the most beautifully painted of all of Ward's creations. The two principal ships are painstakingly rendered to capture exact details of rigging and overall form, while other vessels are depicted in the distance. Ice floes drift on the sea, and icebergs loom in the background. The scene is filled with activities associated with whaling: strips of whale flesh are loaded on the Swan at the left; a long boat tows a dead whale in the middle distance; and a boat pursues a sounding whale near the Isabella at the right. Most remarkable is the array of wildlife present, including three seals and pairs of polar bears, walruses, and narwhales; seagulls skim the water and ice, searching for, and in some cases finding, morsels of blubber.

The Gallery's collection has only a few marine pictures by British artists and none depicting an Arctic scene. The Northern Whale Fishery: The "Swan" and "Isabella," with its charming and appealing subject and the exceptionally fine aesthetic level of its realization, is thus an important and welcome addition.

John Ward of Hull, The Northern Whale Fishery: the "Swan" and "Isabella", c. 1840, The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, 2007.114.1

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, David Octavius Hill at the gate of Rock House, Edinburgh, 1843–1847

The National Gallery of Art has recently acquired a private collection of forty-one important British photographs by several of the foremost photographers of the mid-nineteenth century, including the pathbreaking Scottish photographic team of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Oscar Gustav Rejlander, and William Henry Fox Talbot.

Among the works by Hill and Adamson—fourteen calotypes from the medium's first decade—is the well-known portrait of David Octavius Hill at the gate of his Edinburgh home and studio, from about 1845. Twelve of the Hill and Adamson prints, including this one, are especially noteworthy because they were presented by Hill to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1852.

The Cameron acquisition consists of five portraits, two allegorical subjects, and two group photographs, including Summer Days. Made at her home on the Isle of Wight in 1866, only two years into her career, Summer Days features a distinctive, intimate grouping, with Cameron's niece, one of Cameron's maids, and the children of neighbors. The photograph's soft focus, which Cameron manipulated for artistic effect, is strikingly juxtaposed with a background unusual in its unsettling, off-center geometry.

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, David Octavius Hill at the Gate of Rock House, Edinburgh, 1843–1847, salted paper print from a paper negative, Paul Mellon Fund 2007.29.27

Paul Guigou, Washerwomen on the Banks of the Durance, 1866

Paul Guigou was the leading representative of the Provençal school of landscape painters in France before his contemporary Paul Cézanne overtook him in fame. Guigou's great promise was cut short by a fatal stroke in 1871, when he was only thirty-seven. Born near Apt in the Vaucluse region of southern France, Guigou trained in Marseille and Paris but remained devoted to his home region of Provence. He worked primarily along the river Durance (which runs about ten miles north of Aix-en-Provence), near the towns of L'Isle-sur-Sorgue and La Roque d'Anthéron, depicting the rough, rocky landscape of the area with its sunbleached crags and wide blue skies. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon.

Washerwomen on the Banks of the Durance, painted in 1866, when the artist was at the height of his powers, is a work fully characteristic of Guigou. It shows a group of local washerwomen, wrapped against the heat of the sun, at work on the riverbank. But the true subjects are the harsh southern light and the Provençal landscape. In a noticeably austere composition, we see a broad sweep of the Durance as it rounds a bend, the arid alluvial plain, and the edge of the Lubéron mountain range at left, all spread out under a brilliant blue sky.

Guigou was one of a generation of French landscape painters at midcentury who, reacting against the political centralization and cultural domination of Paris, asserted their provincial identity and autonomy by celebrating their local landscapes and ways of life. The example of Gustave Courbet's regionalist realism lies behind this movement, and indeed, Guigou was friendly with Courbet's greatest patron, Alfred Bruyas, whose collection he frequented in the nearby town of Montpellier. Guigou's manner of painting is strong and heavily impasted, a painterly equivalent for the typically rugged Provençal terrain that he favored. This rough and textured surface came to exemplify a "Provençal" style of painting, which was soon adapted and refined by Cézanne—as, for example, in the National Gallery's Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near L'Estaque, c. 1883. Guigou's spare composition and bold palette of ocher and blue influenced another young contemporary painter from Montpellier, Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), as seen in the Gallery's The Ramparts at Aigues-Mortes, 1867.

Paul Guigou, French, 1834–1871, Washerwomen on the Banks of the Durance, 1866, oil on canvas, 66 x 115 cm (26 x 45 1/4 in.), Chester Dale Fund, 2007.73.1

William Merritt Chase, Study of Flesh Color and Gold, 1888/1889

William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), one of New York's most prominent artists in the 1880s, surpassed all others in the use of pastel. In his adept hands, pastel's chalky matter rivaled the authority of oil paint, though with greater receptivity to light and an unmatched velvety texture. Chase produced more than one hundred pastels in the 1880s, increasing the visibility of the medium in exhibitions and promoting the technique with forward-looking artists of the day.

The pastel has borne more than one title since its making. The Gallery has reinstated Study of Flesh Color and Gold, which was used when the pastel was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1897 and is reminiscent of titles favored by James McNeill Whistler. Consider, for example, Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold or his Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Black. Chase was an exuberant admirer of Whistler's work and sought out his acquaintance while on a trip to London in 1885. By all accounts the two men got along famously, but Chase eventually tired of the older artist's quarrelsome behavior. Nonetheless, he maintained respect for Whistler's work and continued to laud his accomplishments.

In Study of Flesh Color and Gold, Chase applied the pastel relatively densely and with exceptional vigor, maneuvering the colored crayon as one would a brush loaded with oil paint. In keeping with the contemporary vogue for Japonisme, Chase (like Whistler) adopted Japanese props. He tilted the picture plane and cropped the composition, devices common to Japanese prints. Like Kitagawa Utamaro, whose eighteenth-century prints were coveted by avant-garde artists at the time, Chase focused on the figure's bare back. But he heightened the effect—to the point of its being somewhat startling—by placing the model in the extreme forefront of the composition, adding a modern sensibility to a traditional Japanese subject.

Margaret and Raymond Horowitz began acquiring art in the mid-1960s, assembling one of the finest collections of American impressionist and realist works in private hands, a selection of which was the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in 1999. In addition to this sumptuous pastel by Chase, the Gallery has been the beneficiary of other gifts from the Horowitz collection, including a superb painting from 1891 by Childe Hassam, Poppies, Isles of Shoals.

William Merritt Chase American, 1849–1916, Study of Flesh Color and Gold, 1888 pastel on paper, 45.72 x 33.02 cm (18 x 13 in.), Gift of Raymond J. and Margaret Horowitz, 2007.94.2

Marius de Zayas and Agnes Ernst Meyer, Mental Reactions, 1915

Mental Reactions—by general accounts the earliest example of visual poetry in America—is the original maquette for a printed version published in the avant-garde magazine 291. Both a drawing and a poem, the work is a collaboration between the Mexican-born caricaturist Marius de Zayas (1880–1961) and the American journalist and art patron Agnes Ernst Meyer (1887–1970). Its existence was apparently unknown until it was offered for sale last December. Coincidentally, the Gallery had acquired the printed version—the April 1915 issue of 291—a year earlier.

De Zayas left Mexico for New York in 1907 and within two years was exhibiting at Alfred Stieglitz's Fifth Avenue gallery, known as 291. Defining himself as a "propagandist for modern art," de Zayas helped arrange Pablo Picasso's first United States exhibition—a show held at 291 in 1911—and a pioneering exhibition of African sculpture at the same gallery in 1914. On visits to Paris in 1910 and 1914 he met the most advanced artists and writers working in Europe, including Guillaume Apollinaire—French poet, critic, and editor of the review Les Soirées de Paris—whose calligrams, or visual poems, had a powerful influence on him. Writing to Stieglitz from Paris in July 1914, de Zayas enthused: "[Apollinaire] is doing in poetry what Picasso is doing in painting. He uses actual forms made up with letters. All these show a tendency towards the fusion of the so-called arts." Apollinaire published four of de Zayas' caricatures in Les Soirées de Paris in 1914, and the following year de Zayas published one of Apollinaire's calligrams in 291, introducing the newest synthesis of word and image to an American audience.

Another member of the Stieglitz circle visiting Paris that July was Agnes Meyer, whom de Zayas took to see Picasso's latest works. Returning to New York after the war broke out, Meyer and de Zayas joined forces with Stieglitz and the French businessman and photographer Paul Haviland, another Stieglitz associate, to found the magazine 291. Its second issue featured a full-page printed version of Mental Reactions, in which Meyer's poem, cut into individually trimmed blocks of pasted-down text, is literally strewn across the page. De Zayas' bold, cubistlike composition lends structure to the whole, but for readers there is no single or prescribed direction. We begin at the upper left and confront, as the text descends, multiple pathways and multiple readings. The poem records the random musings and doubts of a woman torn between an illicit romance ("why cannot all the loves of all the world be mine?") and dutifulness ("Their bed-time. / They will want to say good-night. / I must go."). While 291 was hardly a feminist journal, it was sympathetic to women's causes and receptive to examining the female identity and condition.

Mental Reactions represents an early chapter in the history of Dada. To reach a broader audience, de Zayas sent copies of 291 to vanguard artists in Europe, including Tristan Tzara, a leader in the emerging Dada movement. Tzara, in turn, sent publications to de Zayas, making him the conduit for Dada ideas in New York. De Zayas was never a member of the Dada group, and the scholar Francis M. Naumann has rightly pointed out that he would have rejected its nihilism. Nonetheless, innovative works such as Mental Reactions were known to the dadaists in Europe and are part of Dada's larger history.

Agnes Ernst first met Alfred Stieglitz and the 291 circle in 1908, when she was an enterprising freelance reporter for the New York Sun. After marrying the wealthy financier Eugene Meyer two years later, she became an avid art collector and a generous patron. Eugene and Agnes Meyer donated important works to the National Gallery beginning in 1958, including paintings by Paul Cézanne and Edouard Manet, sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, and watercolors by John Marin. Agnes Meyer was the mother of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her autobiography, Personal History.

Marius de Zayas, Mexican, 1880–1961, Agnes Ernst Meyer, American, 1887–1970, Mental Reactions, 1915, brush and black ink with collage of cut-and-pasted texts over graphite on paperboard, 72.55 x 57.15 cm (28 9/16 x 22 1/2 in.), Gift of Helen Porter and James T. Dyke, 2007.37.1

Salomon van Ruysdael, River Landscape with Ferry, 1649

A landmark of Dutch landscapes, Salomon van Ruysdael's River Landscape with Ferry, signed and dated 1649, is now on view in the West Building Dutch galleries. Imposing in scale and visually compelling, it depicts a ferryboat filled with travelers, including some seated in a horse-drawn carriage, crossing a broad river near a turreted castle. A large clump of trees silhouetted against the windswept blue sky provides a framework for the animals and humans activating the scene. Light floods into this harmonious composition, illuminating the leaves of the trees as well as the distant sailboats and village church.

Salomon van Ruysdael (1603–1670), one of the leading landscape painters of his generation, was renowned for the atmospheric effects he created in his images of life along peaceful Dutch waterways. In the 1640s he helped lay the foundation for the classical period of Dutch landscape and influenced a generation of artists, including his nephew Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, and Aelbert Cuyp, who are well-represented in the Gallery's collection.

The acquisition marks the first painting by Salomon van Ruysdael to enter the Gallery's collection and was made possible with funds from the Patrons' Permanent Fund and The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund. This acquisition was made possible through the generosity of the family of Jacques Goudstikker, in his memory.

Salomon van Ruysdael, Dutch, 1600/1603 - 1670, River Landscape with Ferry, 1649, oil on canvas, 101.5 x 134.8 cm (39 15/16 x 53 1/16 in.), 2007.116.1