With regional museums closed and waiting to reopen, we decided to remind readers of their important collections by highlighting visual art works you can visit as soon as social distancing practices change and museum doors open.
And since it is the start of summer, we are starting with a New Jersey shore scene found in the New Jersey State Museum: “Sea Bright, New Jersey.” It was painted by Louis Comfort Tiffany around 1878.
The son of the man who founded the famed luxury jewelry company, the younger Tiffany gained fame for his stained glass company.
But originally he set his sights on painting, and after academic training he worked individually with George Innes, one of the most prominent American artists of the era. In the 1870s he started a series of outdoor works near his summer homes, including one in Sea Bright.
As NJSM notes in a catalog of its collection, the artist worked to combine “two trends in American painting: detailed realism and the close tonality of softly focused form. As Tiffany become more and more concerned with color and form the abstract quality of surface patterns began to dominate his paintings. In 1889, at the end of the decade in which he started to concentrate his efforts on his theories of design and glassmaking, he began to flatten space and simplify forms.”
The New Jersey State Museum is located at 205 West State Street in Trenton. For more information about the museum and its reopening: www.state.nj.us/state/museum.
