Tonalism with Mary Ann Hollihan
Tonalism: with Exhibition Curator, Fairfield University Museum Mary Ann Hollihan
Thursday, September 25 from 6:30 – 7:30 PM
Registration required for In Person
Are you familiar with the art term Tonalism? If your curiosity is piqued, or just want to learn more about this beautiful art form, you will want to meet Mary Ann Hollihan.
The term Tonalism is associated primarily with a type of landscape and seascape produced by artists working in and around New York and Boston during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their predecessors were the landscape painters of the early to mid-nineteenth-century who comprised what came to be called the Hudson River School—painting canvases that explored the beauty of the Americas, proclaimed the idea of Manifest Destiny, and served the heady optimism of the young United States. The Tonalist painters embraced the ideas of a new era as the psychological wreckage of the Civil War, and increased industrialization challenged the narrative of God-ordained grandeur, classically composed vistas, and luminous,
crystalline views.
Mary Ann Hollihan is an independent art historian with a specialty in 19th-century American painting and furniture. A Connecticut native, she lives and works from a farm in Canaan, CT. She attended the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia Law School, and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in New York. After a spell practicing law, she returned to art history, working as a research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and eventually publishing a book on New York Federal furniture. She began collecting American paintings in graduate school and she and her husband Jack have amassed a significant collection of Hudson River School and tonalist painters as well as high style New York Federal furniture. Mary Ann recently curated an exhibition of tonalist paintings for the University of Fairfield Art Museum in Fairfield CT titled “Dawn & Dusk: Tonalism in Connecticut.”
Oliver Wolcott Library
160 South Street
Litchfield CT 06759
