William Ranney: Art Exhibit Review (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Until his death from tuberculosis in 1857, at the age of 44, William Ranney was among the liveliest and most beloved suppliers of homespun imagery of the hazards and romance of the American West. But after the Civil War he fell out of sight as tastes changed and that kind of work was no longer fashionable.
Now he has returned, as the focus of an unabashedly nostalgic but visually delightful retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on tour from the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo. Few of the 60 paintings and dozen drawings gathered here have been shown together since his last retrospective in the mid-1960s, so this Ranney showcase has the effect of a minor revelation.
Though Ranney was best known for his frontier scenes, they constitute less than a third of his meager output of about 150 works. A virtue of this exhibition is that it fills in the career blanks, with several bays of terrific hunting and sporting pictures, historical and rural genre scenes and his early portraits. Among the exhibits are paintings once considered lost but recently rediscovered by the show’s curator, Sarah E. Boehme.
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Now he has returned, as the focus of an unabashedly nostalgic but visually delightful retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on tour from the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo. Few of the 60 paintings and dozen drawings gathered here have been shown together since his last retrospective in the mid-1960s, so this Ranney showcase has the effect of a minor revelation.
Though Ranney was best known for his frontier scenes, they constitute less than a third of his meager output of about 150 works. A virtue of this exhibition is that it fills in the career blanks, with several bays of terrific hunting and sporting pictures, historical and rural genre scenes and his early portraits. Among the exhibits are paintings once considered lost but recently rediscovered by the show’s curator, Sarah E. Boehme.