Frick Art & Historical Center
May 9 – August 2
10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Just in time for the idyllic greens and blooms of spring is a new exhibition opening this weekend at the Frick Art Museum that explores historic landscape painting. Spanning nearly four centuries, Rolling Hills, Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape features more than 60 works of art, including major oil paintings, watercolors, drawings and photographs.
Tracing the development of landscape painting in Britain from the 17th century to contemporary times, Rolling Hills, Satanic Mills takes its evocative title from William Blake’s 1804 poem “Jerusalem,” which contrasts the Britain’s rural green countryside with the country’s newly emerging industrial cities.
Drawn from the renowned collections of Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales, the exhibition is divided into six thematic sections that look at paintings from the Industrial Revolution to present-day postmodernism.
Starting with the work of old masters Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, the exhibition features an international roster of artists, from famed British painters John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough and J. M.W. Turner, to pioneering Impressionists Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley.
Visitors will have the rare chance to see these extraordinary paintings outside their home in Wales, while also gaining fresh insights about relationships between artists and landscapes, evolving tastes of collectors and shifting perceptions about the natural environment.
Museum-goers will discover the 17th-century origins of landscape painting via works by two fathers of the genre, Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, and will explore a range of visual responses to nature—from Biblical, classical, idyllic and nostalgic, to romanticized, subjective, contemplative and emotional.
While mainly depicting British subjects, the artworks also draw compelling parallels between the rolling hills and satanic mills of Britain and the peaks and valleys of industrial Pittsburgh. In addition, institutional art collections in Pittsburgh and Cardiff were similarly shaped by the tastes of 19th-century collectors who often made their fortunes through industry.
Augmenting the exhibition will be Hills & Mills: Pittsburgh on Paper, a complementary installation of watercolors, prints and drawings depicting Pittsburgh’s development and industrialization between 1900 and 1940.
Be sure to book the site’s brand new thematic tour of Clayton that looks at Henry Clay Frick as an industrialist collector whose business career forged in the coal fields of Pennsylvania allowed him to form one of the world’s most famous art collections.
Looking for some after-hours art? As part of its brand new Summer Fridays, The Frick will remain open until 9 p.m. on Friday evenings during the run of Rolling Hills, Satanic Mills. Bring family and friends to see the exhibition, tour Clayton, enjoy a picnic on the lawn and participate in hands-on activities from May 9th through August 2nd!
