Exhibition | Romantic Spirits: Nineteenth Century Paintings from the Johnson Collection

Mar 25, 2015 — May 31, 2015

The exhibition Romantic Spirits: Nineteenth Century Paintings from the Johnson Collection invites viewers to consider romanticism as it developed between 1810 and 1896 in the South. The exhibition, which includes paintings by Gustave Henry Mosler, Thomas Addison Richards, Joseph Rusling Meeker, Robert Walter Weir, and Thomas Sully, portrays the historical, social, and cultural influences that informed their and other artists’ work. The region’s natural beauty and scenes of daily life combine with heroic portrayals of soldiers and statesmen and depictions of impending change to create a complex, evocative look at the American South.

The exhibition Romantic Spirits is accompanied by a publication of the same name, written by Estill Curtis Pennington. On view at the GCMA through May 31, the exhibition will then travel to the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, the Columbus (GA) Museum of Art, and the Knoxville Museum of Art. 

A private collection located in Spartanburg, the Johnson Collection surveys visual art in the American South from the late eighteenth century to the present.