GARRISON, NY.- Boscobel House and Gardens announced Scenic Vistas: Landscape as Culture in Early New York, a sweeping new exhibition that brings together historic 19th-century decorative arts and contemporary works to demonstrate the longstanding significance of landscape depictions in the Hudson Valley. Their most expansive exhibition to date, Scenic Vistas will also mark the reopening of Boscobel’s Historic House Museum for Preservation in Progress tours after a 17-month emergency restoration.
On view across the Historic House Museum, Visitor Center Gallery, and Great Lawn, Scenic Vistas highlights how depictions of landscapes were central to domestic life, design, and identity in New York, long before the rise of the Hudson River School. The exhibition showcases the range of landscape imagery abundant in ceramics, furniture, and other decorative arts created or known in New York before 1825, alongside contemporary works in conversation with the past.
“Our complex relationship to landscapes is at the heart of Hudson Valley life and culture,” says Boscobel’s Executive Director and Curator Jennifer Carlquist. “Early New Yorkers populated their homes with scenic views both real and imagined, and by the early 1800s created a thriving industry for decorative painters and artistic representations of landscapes.”
A centerpiece of the exhibition is a rare set of six maple side chairs, made in New York circa 1815, each distinguished by a scenic painted tablet back. Though crushed in the April 2024 ceiling collapse, the chairs are now undergoing meticulous restoration, embodying both resilience and artistry. Representing nearly a decade of thoughtful acquisitions, these works reflect Boscobel’s curatorial vision and core mission, while resonating with the evolving relationship between the house, its grounds, and the surrounding landscape.
In dialogue with these historic objects, the exhibition features contemporary works by artists living and working in the Hudson Valley, including Kat Howard, Betsy Jacks, Kieran Kinsella, and James McElhinney, alongside new site-specific commissions by Alison McNulty and Jean-Marc Sovak. Sovak’s installation, Cruel Necessity/Unnecessary Cruelty, takes the form of a wallpaper print designed for Boscobel’s entryhall. Drawing upon historical British and American archival prints and illustrations from 19th-century abolitionist publications, the work interlaces familiar narratives of national history with lesser-known, yet equally consequential, episodes tied to Boscobel’s foundation. The resulting motif layers beauty with disquiet, prompting reflection on the intertwined legacies of landscape, labor, and cultural memory.
Another contemporary intervention is Hudson Valley Ghost Column 11, a site-specific installation by Alison McNulty, situated on the footprint of one of two Osborn Maples that framed Boscobel’s Great Lawn since the site’s opening as a museum in 1961. The latest in McNulty’s ongoing series, this site-responsive work comprises a cylindrical form constructed of vintage bricks, sourced from brickyards once active near Boscobel’s original estate in Montrose, and unprocessed Cormo sheep wool sourced from a historic Hudson Valley fiber farm. As material traces of the region's geological, industrial, and social history as well as the components of a new and unfamiliar construction, the Hudson Valley Ghost Columns allow the materials to act as agents, recalling multiple interwoven histories while becoming something other, a form evoking architecture, animal, and body simultaneously with absence.
“In a moment between collapse and progress, Jennifer Calquist has curated a pause that invites us to look backwards in time at what was lost as well as what was left out, and to address the present condition of things at Boscobel,” says McNulty. “Scenic Vistas poses existential questions about the site, offers a look behind the curtain, and reconsiders what stories matter in the preservation of history. I’m honored to be invited, along with an esteemed roster of artists, including makers, designers, craftspeople, architects, and workers in various trades, to look closely at what’s revealed when things break, to think critically about what’s possible and responsible to repair, and to respond to the site in this generative moment of transition.”
In the early 19th century, as New York was emerging as the nation’s leading industrial city, it was also a vibrant center for the decorative arts, where landscape imagery played a pivotal role. Scenic Vistas underscores how these early expressions of landscape both predate and inform the celebrated work of the Hudson River School, reminding us that the artistic impulse to frame, idealize, and interpret the Hudson Valley has deep roots. The exhibition also coincides with the 200th anniversary of Thomas Cole’s formative journey up the Hudson River, launching the movement often described as America’s first painting tradition.
“I love that Boscobel’s collection, site, and programming celebrate Hudson Valley landscapes beyond the frame. It’s no coincidence that our iconic viewshed has inspired both artistic brilliance and some of the nation’s most important environmental movements, where conservation is not just valued, but essential to our shared future,” says Carlquist.
