American art at the de Young Museum

The de Young Museum is one of the biggest fine arts museum I have ever seen. I felt that compared to the Ayala Museum, the de Young Museum is practically sprawling. One collection that blew me away contained the paintings from the Impressionism and the Realism schools.

My absolute favourite among the paintings is the one featuring rainbows above a tropical valley. I learned that this painting, entitled "Rainy Season in the Tropics", is by Frederic Edwin Church. It's such a showstopper because it fully captured the iridescence of the rainbow and the vibrance of the tropical landscape while raining.

The tropical feel is further enhanced by a zoom-in into the forest. The painting below is of a flower and a hummingbird sitting nearby. I didn't take note of the artist, unfortunately. What I like about the painting is the vividness of the colours in the flower and in the hummingbird, compared with the rest of the painting. 

This sunset painting was created by someone in what is called the "Hudson River School", an art movement of landscape artists who created realistic depictions of the environment. I was wowed, for instance, by how vivid the progression of colours was in this sunset by the water. If Bob Ross had The Joy of Painting (tv show) as a means to show how a series of brush strokes could lead to breath-taking landscapes, the Hudson River School followers had cleaner lines; the brush strokes almost disappeared into the canvas... so much so that the paintings already look like photographs!

The realism is further exemplified by this painting of a scene on a courtyard outside what I think is a church. It reminded me of a spot in Aarhus, Denmark... I was quite take aback by how similar this painting was with what I saw. I was with other participants of UNLEASH, straight after the peer evaluations at the University. Near the city centre, a scene like this was what I saw... except that a car was parked near the tree. Of course; modern times, after all. 

The American art collection wasn't limited to paintings. There were a few sculptures as well. I think that the artists who created these statues were probably emulating Renaissance-era sculptures. The toga suggests that these statues are of Greek characters. What I noticed is the implicit indication that the artists viewed beautiful women as shapely and possessing soft features; not the skinny (gaunt, more like it), muscular models that are found in magazine pages and on social media. These women look like they're well-fed (healthy). They are not obese at all... but their torsos are far from flat. We should be reminded about these former versions of beauty because our idea about it now borders the unhealthy.

As I moved to yet another gallery containing another collection, I just had to mull over how strong the European influence was on the artists whose work are displayed in the American art gallery. I'm sure that there are nuanced differences but for my untrained eye, it's going to be difficult to say which ones are European and which ones are American just by looking at the works.