The American International Fine Art Fair will host a panel discussion on the Hudson River School featuring three esteemed scholars of American Art. Titled A Fresh Look at the Hudson River School, the panel will include Linda S. Ferber, Vice President and Senior Art Historian of The New-York Historical Society; Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Curator of American Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Jennifer C. Krieger, Founder and Managing Partner of Hawthorne Fine Art, LLC. The discussion will take place Monday, February 7th, 2011, 2-3pm, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center (650 Okeechobee Boulevard, West Palm Beach, FL).

A Fresh Look at the Hudson River School will explore new topics and perspectives on our country’s first indigenous school of art that previous scholarship has overlooked. Dr. Ferber and Dr. Kornhauser, who represent two of the most significant museum collections of American artworks, will be speaking on the founding of their respective institutions. They will discuss The Metropolitan Museum of Art and New-York Historical Society’s relationships with the artists of the Hudson River School and the presentation of their work from the museums’ earliest years to the present day.

Dr. Kornhauser will describe the significance of the Art Gallery at the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair, which was held in New York City in 1864 as a fundraiser for the Union Army.  “A number of the major paintings shown at the Fair, including such national icons as Frederic Church’s The Heart of the Andes, 1859; Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863; and Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, would later enter the Met’s collections,” she comments. She will explain how many of these paintings will be included in the installation for the new American Wing Galleries for Paintings and Sculpture that are scheduled to open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in January 2012.

Dr. Ferber will discuss the New-York Historical Society's exhibition Hudson River Masterpieces, which will be on view from January 28 to March 20, 2011 at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach. “Drawn from the treasures of the American art collection, the exhibition showcases forty-five important 19th century landscape paintings by Hudson River School artists. The exhibition includes celebrated works by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, founders of the American landscape school. Their landscapes form the core of the earliest N-YHS art collections and will be reinstalled in the Society's renovated building that will reopen in November 2011,” Ferber explains.

As the recent co-curator of the groundbreaking exhibition Remember the Ladies: Women Artists of the Hudson River School, Ms. Krieger will be speaking on the oft-ignored women of the period. She comments, “This remarkable group of female artists was able to overcome all obstacles they faced. Their physical and lifestyle accomplishments in pioneering an exploration of the outdoors and acquiring their subject matter directly from the landscape were just as remarkable as their aesthetic and artistic achievements.”