POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Past Time: Geology in European and American Art is on view September 21 to December 9, 2018, at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College.

The exhibition, curated by Patricia Phagan, is a broad display of watercolors, drawings, oil sketches, and sketchbooks, and looks at studies made by European and American artists from the 1770s to the 1890s who were engaged with a new scientific investigation of the earth’s crust. This inquiry came to be called geology, and it emerged from a mix of interests in minerals and their applications in industry, curiosity about rocks and other features and how they were formed, and theories about how the earth began.

“With the gradual and widening popularity of geology, more artists became engaged with geological motifs as the new discipline grew to its height and was accessible through popular literature and printed illustrations,” says Phagan. “The geology fad was an example of the common knowledge then more widely shared among educated audiences. Not since the mid-nineteenth century have artists and scientists shared such closely overlapping mindsets.”

The exhibition features 49 works of art by leading artists of the period and numerous samples of natural specimens, including red sandstone from Petra, Jordan, and basalt from the Palisades of New Jersey. On view are works by John Ruskin, Joseph Wright of Derby, Thomas Jones, J. M. W. Turner, Claude Bonnefond, Johann Christian Reinhart, Jacob Philipp Hackert, Caspar Wolf, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, and William Trost Richards, among several others. The show draws on Vassar’s rich collection of Hudson River School paintings and drawings. Many works from the permanent collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center are joined by generous loans from the Yale Center for British Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MFA Boston, Morgan Library & Museum, New York Public Library, Cooper Hewitt, Princeton University Art Museum, and Olana State Historic Site at Hudson, New York. Natural specimens are loaned from the collection at Olana of Hudson River School artist Frederic Church, and the A. Scott Warthin Geological Museum at Vassar College.