GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.- The Grand Rapids Art Museum's opened its much-anticipated fall exhibition, Masterpieces of American Landscape Painting 1820-1950—a rare opportunity to see works by some of America’s most-loved artists, inspired by their encounters with the scenic "New World," North America. The exhibition is on view at GRAM October 20, 2013 through January 12, 2014.

This exhibition features 48 paintings from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, spanning Romanticism of the early 1800s to the Modernism of the 1940s, and including paintings by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Maxfield Parrish, Arthur Dove, Martin Johnson Heade, Georgia O'Keeffe and other major artists.

"This exhibition represents some of the finest works and biggest names in American art," said Dana Friis-Hansen, GRAM Director and CEO. "In addition to providing an overview of the history of landscape painting in the United States and views of familiar and famous sites, these paintings show how great artists have celebrated the beauty of nature and captured its essential role in the American experience.”

The highlights include Winslow Homer’s Driftwood, his final painting created at age 73, as well as an early view of what eventually became Yosemite National Park by Albert Bierstadt. Works by Childe Hassam and Willard Metcalf are examples of the newly-created, distinctly American Impressionism, while a Georgia O’Keeffe painting shows how she pushed Modernism to new levels of abstraction.