Thanks To Our Lenders....

Next week we'll begin to hang The Road Less Traveled: Thomas Nason's Rural New England. As of today all of our loans from other institutions have arrived safely. Our exhibition will be beautifully augmented by the cooperation of several other institutions and key objects from their collections.

The story of Nason's collaboration with Robert Frost would be impossible to explain without the loan of a number of rare Frost volumes from the Shain Library Special Collections and Archives from Connecticut College. For those interested in seeing even more first editions of American poetry their William Meredith Collection is not to be missed.

Also from Connecticut College are a number of prints that assist our show in explaining the visual history of wood engraving. These prints are a part of the College's Wetmore Print Collection, which maintains an excellent website of their diverse collection from Rembrandt to Hiroshige.

The region's premiere print room can be found at the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University. The DAC generously loaned four American wood engravings from their extensive collection, providing excellent examples of work by Nason's contemporaries in the field.

Not exactly a contemporary of Nason, Winslow Homer was renowned for his wood engravings which appeared in Harper's Weekly in the nineteenth century. We are lucky to have one of Homer's Civil War illustrations courtesy of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum.

Finally, the argument for Nason's position within the modern American art world could not be made without examples of the country's leading American Regionalists: Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood. The New Britain Museum of American Art provided us with an excellent example of each of these artists. Their complete collection of Benton lithographs allowed for the perfect comparison to Nason's work.