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Bassett Gallery

19th-Century American Art

The Mead's collection of 18th- and 19th-century American art is one of the most significant in western New England. It includes some 600 paintings and sculptures, and over 1,600 works on paper, many of which came to the collection through the generosity of Amherst College alumni and friends, such as George D. Pratt (Class of 1893), Herbert L. Pratt (Class of 1895), Herbert W. Plimpton, and William Gerdts (Class of 1949).

Bassett Gallery features landscapes and genre scenes from the Mead's extensive holdings. The landscapes document the American landscape with romantic and mythological drama. With the dawn of the new republic was born the idea of the nation as the "New Eden," a country unspoiled, infinite, and with unlimited potential. Visual records of this paradise assumed special status and generated a sense of national identity and pride in its citizens. As the settlers moved westward, landscape painting flourished, as evidenced by the Hudson River painters and their followers. Two monumental works by Thomas Cole, The Past and The Present, serve as the cornerstone for this gallery, which displays paintings by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand, Martin Johnson Heade, George Inness, John Frederick Kensett, Willard Metcalf, Thomas Moran, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and others on a rotating basis.

American life is also captured through key works such as The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks, The Fisher Girl by Winslow Homer, Head of a Cowboy by Thomas Eakins, as well as engaging genre scenes by Thomas Doughty, Alvan Fisher, Eastman Johnson, Thomas Hovenden, and others. The gallery also features sculptural scenes as well, and examples by Augustus Saint Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, John Rogers, Frederic Remington, and William Henry Rinehart can be seen at different times.