The connections among American poetry and painting, sculpture, and decorative arts form the center of an outstanding exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
 
A creative exhibition is underway in Hartford, Connecticut, at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. “Sound & Sense: Poetic Musings in American Art” is an eclectic exhibition that will pair a variety of gorgeous objects with verses by celebrated poets. In addition, drawing from the museum’s own permanent collection, artworks that incorporate poetic inscriptions in their compositions or “have direct relationships to America’s rich poetic traditions,” as the museum states, will be included.
 
Highlights of the show include works from Albert Bierstadt, Rockwell Kent, Georgia O’Keeffe, Daniel Chester French, and Isamu Noguchi. Poetic verses from the works of — among others — Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost accompany the art.
 
A particular masterpiece of the exhibition is Thomas Dewing’s “The Days,” circa 1884-1886. The lovely horizontal format of the canvas presents six figures — one male and five females — among a background of rich green foliage and a tree. Each of the female figures hold objects of significance, likely alluding to their identities. Dewing’s soft touch and nearly incandescent tonality have the appearance of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
 
“Sound & Sense: Poetic Musings in American Art” opened on November 14 and will run through April 17.
 
To learn more, visit The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
 
This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.
 


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Andrew Webster is the former Editor of Fine Art Today and worked as an editorial and creative marketing assistant for Streamline Publishing. Andrew graduated from The University of North Carolina at Asheville with a B.A. in Art History and Ceramics. He then moved on to the University of Oregon, where he completed an M.A. in Art History. Studying under scholar Kathleen Nicholson, he completed a thesis project that investigated the peculiar practice of embedded self-portraiture within Christian imagery during the 15th and early 16th centuries in Italy.

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