
DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711180504

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Art Review

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   86 lines

TWEED COLLECTION HAS UNKNOWN GEMS

PAINTINGS FROM the second-generation Hudson River School and from the American Impressionist and Barbizon groups make up much of the work on display in ``American Paintings From the Tweed Museum'' at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg.

The show contains few big-name artists and can be seen as delightful for that reason. You get to meet painters not on everyone's hit parade and, therefore, not overexposed. For the most part, the images are conservative, including inspirational landscapes and romantic figure studies.

Theodore Robinson's ``Flower of Memory'' (1881) is a romantic portrait of a woman in a garden, perhaps grieving for a lost lover or an absent husband. Robinson is now known as an American Impressionist, but this painting is in a realist vein.

As it turns out, Robinson did not adopt the brighter Impressionist palette and more spontaneous en plein air style until 1887, when he met Monet.

A favorite in the collection is a 1867 painting by William Jacob Hays, ``Prairie Dog Village.'' Hays had a strong reputation in his day, but it faded after his death.

His large, horizontal canvas is a panoramic view of the prairie along the upper Missouri River, with prairie dogs looking out warily and scurrying into their burrows in the foreground. In the background, burrows and dogs pepper the field as far as the eye can see.

It's a comical scene that brings to mind how Lewis & Clarke carried a prairie dog to Thomas Jefferson at the end of their expedition. Hays would have sympathized with the natural history part of their mission, being a natural history buff himself who traveled to the West in 1860.

Julian Alden Weir, a major figure in American Impressionism, is represented by ``Path in the Orchard,'' a lushly painted circa 1900 scene of a tree-lined path leading to a country home. In Weir's work, you see the free, buttery paint handling of the French Impressionists.

Homer Dodge Martin was among the Americans influenced by the intimate, responsive landscapes by French Barbizon painters like Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Jean-Francois Millet. His 1887 ``The Clam Digger'' is a moody waterscape - remote, yet affecting - that includes the tiny figure of a digger all but camouflaged by the wet-darkened shoreline.

And there are women artists represented here - a welcome, still-rare occurrence in period shows. Annie Traquair Lang's ``Conversation in the Park'' is a small painting of three people in a park. The brushwork is very assured and energetic, nearly obscuring the particulars of the scene.

The tale of the collector is as captivating as the art. George Tweed (1871-1946) began life as the first of 11 children in a struggling Minnesota family. He became a millionaire, leaving a legacy of about 600 American and European paintings to a museum at the University of Minnesota at Duluth founded in his name in 1950.

He made his fortune in iron mining, finance and banking. In the 1920s, he made frequent trips to New York, where he bought art in bulk.

His wife was the true art lover, yet she never went with him, said J. Gray Sweeney, author of the museum's American paintings catalog. ``He'd tell a dealer, `Give me ten paintings by big-name artists; ship 'em back to my wife.' ''

Never the connoisseur, he was burned a few times regarding authenticity. Yet an anecdote in the catalog indicates he enjoyed the paintings.

For a time, he corresponded with an expert on the late 19th century American painter Frank Duve-neck, whose ``Portrait of an Elderly Woman'' is in the show. Finally, the expert wrote Tweed that he might have a fake.

The collector ended their relationship with this note: ``And, as for the signature seeming unfamiliar, - that is something in its favor rather than against it, because the easiest thing I know of to handle is the signature of a painting. . . I am not going to take you very seriously because I am very, very pleased with the picture.''

Clearly a willful, stubborn man. Yet - almost by accident, it would seem - he managed to glean some real gems to share with the world. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Annie Traquair Lang's ``Conversation in the Park'' is exhibited at

the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg.

Graphic

WANT TO GO?

What: ``American Painting From the Tweed Museum''

Where: Muscarelle Museum of Art, Jamestown Road, Williamsburg

When: Through Dec. 7

Hours: 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. weekdays, noon to 4 p.m. weekends

How much: free

Call: (757) 221-2700