In many accounts of artistic practice, miniature-scaled works are assigned subsidiary roles, valued as mere precursors to later, larger, and more significant compositions. Subverting familiar expectations in the history of the landscape genre, the more than 100 paintings, drawings, and photographs included in This Drop of Earth: American Landscape Miniatures, 1840-1890 demonstrate the multifaceted ways small pictures were big business in nineteenth-century America, related to but independent from their larger siblings.

Drawn from a lauded private collection, this exhibition is the first to recognize and contextualize the prominent practice of painting highly finished and miniature-scaled compositions. Often called “cabinet” pictures for the small rooms or cabinets where they were displayed, these paintings are remarkable for their intricate detail and technical prowess. The installation will include paintings by many prominent landscape painters of the period including Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Robert Seldon Duncanson, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Winslow Homer, John Frederick Kensett, Ralph Albert Blakelock, and Aaron Draper Shattuck.

Comprising small-scale works from all areas of the Americas, including South America and the Northern, Southern, and Western United States, this installation illustrates the complexity, nuance, and regional resonances of such pictures. By distilling huge vistas of the natural world into portable, possessable pictures, the miniature landscape format became increasingly desirable during the nineteenth century. The chronicle of this phenomenon offers new understandings for American landscape painting and its history.

Curated by Caroline Culp, Ph.D.

June 20, 2024 – October 20, 2024

Peirce Prince Gallery