Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum February 15, 2003 to September 12, 2004 Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Art Museum logo
A Word from P&G - Overview of Extraordinary Gifts: Selected Paintings from The Procter and Gamble Collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati Painters and the Big Picture - discusses how Cincinnati Artists fit into a larger art historical perspective The Works from The P&G Collection - themed galleries of the works in the show Index by Artist Name - a list of all the artists represented in the show and the works they completed Go back to the Cincinnati Art Museum Home page
   Procter & Gamble gave an elastic definition to the Cincinnati painter. The collection spans more than a century, from the 1830s, when the city was nurturing a small but surprisingly lively art scene, through the 1940s, a decade of great change. Native artists form an impressive group that encompasses such fine painters as Robert Frederick Blum, Elizabeth Nourse, John Henry Twachtman, and Dixie Selden. Some like Selden and Lewis Henry Meakin, who arrived as a boy, chose to settle in the area and became part of a close-knit community. Others, like Blum, Twachtman, and Nourse, fled the nest, armed with an education in painting that rivaled nearly any to be found in the country. Although many of the artists represented here trained in the Queen City, this was not the case for some like Robert Henri and William Verplanck Birney. These painters departed Ohio as youths and embarked on noteworthy careers in the East. Procter & Gamble also acquired masterworks by artists who, although not natives, established themselves in the city for a critical period, fostered by its supportive environment. Robert S. Duncanson and Lilly Martin Spencer are in this category. Painters drawn to Cincinnati by employment opportunities were also embraced. For example, New Yorker Paul Ashbrook came to the city to work for its renowned lithography industry, while several decades later Herbert Barnett, also from the East, assumed a faculty position at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
   Because the artists’ relations to Cincinnati vary so widely, the collection is rich in its diversity. The artists cross generations, race, and gender, and their paintings represent a spectrum of artistic goals and thematic interests. Each painter followed his or her own unique, personal vision, yet took a place, often a very significant one, in the national story of American art.