Smithsonian American Art Museum
Special Installation of Nineteen American Masterworks
April 17, 2015 – August 16, 2015
Nineteen major paintings lent from the private collection of Thelma and Melvin Lenkin of Chevy Chase, Maryland, are on view on the second floor galleries of the museum as part of a special installation. Many of these works are on public display for the first time.
Integrated within the chronological flow of the museum’s permanent collection, these masterworks from Gilded Age, Impressionist, and Ashcan School painters help to tell the story of the late 19th century and early 20th centuries in America, a “coming-of-age” period in American art. Mary Cassatt’s renowned Portrait of a Lady (The Artist’s Mother Reading Le Figaro) is joined by major paintings by George Bellows, Martin Johnson Heade, John Singer Sargent, John Sloan, William Glackens, John La Farge, Everett Shinn, and others.
Mary Cassatt, Portrait of a Lady (The Artist’s Mother Reading Le Figaro), about 1877-78, oil on canvas, Lent by Thelma and Melvin Lenkin
