Sitting Pretty: 200 Years of American Portrait Painting from the
Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art

September 10 – December 11, 2022

Read the exhibition catalog online.

Edward Savage, John Hancock and Dorothy Quincy Hancock (Mrs. John Hancock), 1775/1789.

Edward Savage, John Hancock and Dorothy Quincy Hancock (Mrs. John Hancock), 1775/1789. Oil on canvas, 90 3/4 x 59 1/4 in. Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Bequest of Woodbury Blair).

 

Sitting Pretty: Two Hundred Years of American Portrait Painting from the Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art features a selection from the nearly one hundred portraits in oil that the American University Museum at the Katzen Center received from the oldest museum in Washington when it was dissolved in 2014. Among the artists from the colonial period to the present included in this compelling exhibition, all of whom were important in their day, are Edward Savage, John Wollaston, Thomas Sully, Henry Inman, George Peter Alexander Healy, Frank Duveneck, Julian Alden Weir, and Edmund Tarbell. Portraits by Charles Dunn, Edgar Nye, Richard Lahey, Eugen Weisz, and Rebecca Davenport speak specifically to the Washington art community in the middle decades of the twentieth century.  

This exhibition is organized by Carolyn Kinder Carr, former National Portrait Gallery Deputy Director and Chief Curator

George Biddle, Terai Hara, 1922.

George Biddle, Terai Hara, 1922. Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 × 23 1/4 × 7/8 in. Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Gift of the artist).