American Travelers: A Watercolor Journey Through Spain, Portugal, and Mexico

New York (May 2022) – The Hispanic Society Museum & Library (HSM&L) is pleased to present a new exhibition, American Travelers: A Watercolor Journey Through Spain, Portugal, and Mexico. The show focuses on major watercolors by American artists that were painted in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, in dialogue with decorative art objects from the HSM&L collections from the actual places and monument depicted in the watercolors. The show will include a suite of contemporary watercolor paintings by California-based artist Timothy J. Clark (b. 1951), best known for his large watercolor paintings. The exhibition is on view at the HSM&L in the East Building Gallery from June 17, 2022 to October, 16 2022.

American Travelers: A Watercolor Journey Through Spain, Portugal, and Mexico brings to the spotlight the museum’s robust collection of watercolors by United States artists painted in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Works by Childe Hassam, Max Kuehne, George Wharton Edwards, Ernest Clifford Peixotto, Florence Vincent Robinson, Orville Houghton Peets and Milan Petrovic are presented in conjunction with a collection of recent watercolor paintings by Timothy J. Clark.

“Travel has, unfortunately, been a rarity for many these past few years,” says Guillaume Kientz, Director and CEO of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. “While we may not always be able to travel physically, art is fantastic way to transport oneself to another world, offering an instant portal to faraway places. The artists in this exhibition offer visitors access to many different regions, and they were each influenced by Sorolla, having discovered the Hispanic world through his works in the HSM&L permanent collections. The museum collections, and particularly Sorolla’s work, ignited their appetites for Hispanic art and culture. This exhibition invites visitors on a journey that is all at once geographical, artistic and personal, allowing us to follow the paths of these trailblazing artists.

The exhibition features 94 works, 83 of which are from the HSM&L permanent collection, including one work by Clark. 11 additional works on display by Clark are sourced from various collections.

Since the days of Washington Irving, Spain has held a fascination for American writers and visual artists. For example, John Singer Sargent painted at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and in Granada. Other nineteenth-century North American painters such as William Merritt Chase, Harry Humphrey Moore and Mary Cassatt, and younger artists such as Childe Hassam and Robert Henri, toured and painted in Spain as an essential part of their artistic development. When the Hispanic Society Museum & Library opened its doors in 1908, it became a source of inspiration for American artists with Hispanic interests.

“This exhibition idea resulted from my study of the works of Childe Hassam in our collection, and the awareness of the role that Hassam’s visit to the 1909 Sorolla exhibition at the Hispanic Society played in his decision to return to Spain in 1910,” says Marcus B. Burke, Ph.D., Senior Curator, emeritus at the Museum Department of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. “The result was a series of remarkable works that, when displayed in the 2004 Hassam retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, documented a remarkable series of Hispanic influences on one of America’s greatest artists. I was also aware of a remarkable series of small oil sketches (pochette panels) made by Max Kuehne around 1920; Kuehne had also been inspired by the Hispanic Society’s collections.  A decade later, when the traveling exhibition, “Sorolla and America,” visited San Diego in 2014, a southern California artist, Timothy J. Clark, attended the show, over half of which had come from the Hispanic Society’s collections.  Like Hassam and Kuehne before him, Clark was inspired to return to Spain, and subsequently, return to Mexico, with the precedent of Sorolla in mind.  As I came to know Clark and his large-scale watercolors, I began to investigate more fully this aspect of our collection of 6,800 drawings and watercolors.  To my very pleasant surprise, I found a huge treasure of splendid works of art by now little-known American artists, all of whom had visited Spain with conscious awareness of the Hispanic Society, its Founder, Archer Milton Huntington, and its collections.”