Metropolitan Museum of Art: American painting
The American paintings galleries, on the second floor of the American Wing, begin in a maze of rooms on the second floor with eighteenth-century portraits (look out for the heroics of Leutzes 's Washington Crossing the Delaware ), but really get going with West 's allegorical The Triumph of Love and the nineteenth-century landscape painters of the Hudson Valley School, who glorified the landscape in their vast lyrical canvases. Cole , the school's doyen, is represented by The Oxbow , his pupil Church by an immense Heart of the Andes - combining the grand sweep of the mountains with minutely depicted flora. Also here are several striking portraits by Sargent including the magnificent Portrait of Madam X .Winslow Homer is allowed most of a gallery to himself - fittingly for a painter who so greatly influenced the late-nineteenth-century artistic scene in America. Homer began his career illustrating the day-to-day realities of the Civil War - there's a good selection here that shows the tedium and sadness of that era. His talent in recording detail carried over into his late, quasi-Impressionistic studies of seascapes of which Northeaster is one of the finest.
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