Author Description

"Museums have storage vaults filled with work that was once thought to be meritorious, but is now considered so embarassingly bad that it will never be allowed to see the light of day. The work of William Lathrop and his colleagues in the New Hope School of landscape painting has fortunately suffered a different (though related) fate. By any standard, these artists were remarkably successful during their lifetimes, especially in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when their work was almost universally celebrated. Though it's hard to believe today, in their prime many of these painters were considered somewhat avant-grade. But most of the famous turn-of-the-century landscape artists were quickly forgotten in the rush toward socially conscious art and modernism. Only now, at the end of the century and the beginning of the next, are scholars, collectors, and the general public beginning to rediscover the quiet genius of these earlier masters of the landscape."--Foreword