The Gilded Age Debuts in Chattanooga

Indulge in the artistic elegance of the turn-of-the-century era known as the Gilded Age.

The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum will be showing from June 23 to August 27, 2000 at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Charles Walter Stetson painted the strange magic of flowers. Springing forth like an apparition, positioned against an indeterminate background, the pale magnolia opens toward us. According to the conventional symbolism of Victorian flower painting, the magnolia represented magnificence. Indeed, the blossom's scale and presence confirm its status among flowers.

Source: Elizabeth Prelinger. The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000).

Pictured: Charles Walter Stetson, 1858 USA–1911 Italy, Magnolia, 1895, oil on canvas mounted on fiberglass, 24 1/4 x 20 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.