How Century-Old Paintings Reveal the Indigenous Roots and Natural History of New England Landscapes
Seven guest collaborators bring new eyes to a Smithsonian museum founder’s collection of American art
When industrialist Charles Lang Freer donated his art collection to the Smithsonian in 1906, he specified that the institution could neither lend out any pieces from it nor accept any lent artwork from other places to include in it. While he later adjusted his will to allow for new discoveries that might make it prudent to expand the collection of approximately 7,500 pieces of mostly East Asian art that he was donating, curators for the last century have operated with the understanding that he never meant for the American portion of his bequest—about 1,500 works—to grow.
His American art collection now resides at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, which opened as the Freer Gallery of Art in 1923, four years after Freer’s death.
“This collection is essentially frozen in amber,” says Diana Greenwold, the museum’s curator of American art. That makes the task of recontextualizing the work for new audiences more than a century after Freer’s death a daunting challenge.
“I don’t have the option of buying into the collection,” Greenwold says. “I don’t have the option of commissioning a contemporary artist.”
But while Greenwold and her fellow curators can’t borrow paintings for the museum’s American collection, there’s nothing in Freer’s bequest that stops them from borrowing additional pairs of eyes. For the museum’s exhibition “Shifting Boundaries: Perspectives on American Landscapes,” which opened this summer and closes in July 2026, Greenwold wanted to demonstrate how painters Willard Metcalf, Dwight Tryon, Winslow Homer and Abbott Thayer, among others, captured scenes of nature that appeared to be tranquil and unchanging but were in fact in flux. To identify works from the collection worth highlighting, the museum recruited seven collaborators, the majority of whom bring expertise from disciplines outside of art history. They have substantial aptitudes “in environment, in landscape, in botany, in particular approaches to New England landscapes,” Greenwold says.
The panel looked at roughly 70 landscapes and seascapes from Freer’s American art collection, ultimately agreeing on a selection of 11 paintings and three works on paper that held a particular resonance for the group, several of which have long been out of view to the public. The collaborators then wrote labels for the objects they chose and worked with the museum team to edit them. Photographs of the collaborators who wrote each label are included alongside the text, an indicator of just how subjective a process this was—by design.
For example, Stephanie Toothman, a collaborator who is now retired from the National Park Service, wrote about Early Evening, a scene featuring two women gazing out at the Maine coast that Winslow Homer painted in 1881, then reworked in 1907. Toothman writes that the painting calls to mind her grandmother’s family who lived on the coast of Nova Scotia. Toothman even shared a photo of her grandmother and a friend circa 1918, which is reproduced in miniature on the label for Early Evening.
Another collaborator who shared a personal document to help contextualize her appreciation of these paintings is Elizabeth James-Perry, an Aquinnah Wampanoag artist and writer who has a degree in marine science. James-Perry’s 2021 painting Bear Map, a depiction of the regional landscape in the shape of a bear, is on display.
Mashq/Bear Decolonized Map, Elizabeth James-Perry, digital scan of watercolor and graphite on paper, 2021
Amherst College Archives & Special Collections / Courtesy of Elizabeth James-Perry
“She calls it a decolonized map,” Greenwold says. “What you’re seeing here is the landscape of New England. She sees the body of a bear in that—which is beautiful—but rather than offer our visitors the state demarcations, so you can tell where New Hampshire starts and Vermont ends, what we have here are all Indigenous names for different mountains or for different regions.”
In this way, James-Perry points out that many of the places the American artists whose work Freer collected are to this day known by names drawn from Indigenous languages, even though the communities that spoke those languages had been driven from their native lands. New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock, as James-Perry writes for Thayer’s 1912 painting Monadnock No. 2, “likely means ‘abundant land’ in the Wampanoag and Abenaki languages.” James-Perry concludes by asking, “What is the fascination with tribal names for landmarks when Indigenous people who long resided here and possess the knowledge and connection to the land are not given much thought?”
Monadnock No. 2, Abbott Handerson Thayer, oil on canvas, 1912
National Museum of Asian Art
Full-time curators “tend to gravitate toward favorites,” Greenwold says. This group “had none of that baggage.” She was particularly pleased that this process resulted in the selection of Albert Pinkham Ryder’s The Red Cow, circa 1870. “We don’t show this one very often because it’s little and it’s strange and it’s hard to see,” she says. The supposition had been that Freer acquired the oil painting because its warm texture was suggestive of ceramics, which he loved.
But collaborator Lorette Picciano of the Rural Coalition responded to the painting’s content rather than its form, considering the cow as both “an immigrant from Europe” and a harbinger of the coming industrialization of our food supply. “Pasteurization and refrigeration will make her milk safe to ship to urban centers to meet growing demand,” Picciano writes. “Though she came as an immigrant herself, will she be pushed to her limit to sustain newer arrivals? How will she feel about milking machines?”
Picciano “has this whole context of labor and agriculture and animal husbandry that she brings to this that I would never have seen,” Greenwold says excitedly. “It’s not a connection I would’ve made.”
Sometimes more than one collaborator had a response to a painting that was strong and distinct enough to warrant commentary. Dwight William Tryon’s dreamy 1912 painting of thin trees, Twilight: November, gets comments from both ecologist Dennis Chestnut and Lauren Brandes of Smithsonian Gardens. Chestnut, in his exhibition label, praises the way Tryon captured “the unique time of day that can be described as Almost. Almost the end of daylight. Almost evening just before night.”
Twilight: November, Dwight William Tryon, oil on wood panel, 1912
National Museum of Asian Art
Brandes, who brought more than 20 years of experience as a landscape architect to the “Shifting Boundaries” project, was unfamiliar with Tryon’s work before the invitation came to collaborate on the exhibition. Initially, she recalls, it was the “mysterious quality” of the colors that drew her to Twilight: November. But as she contemplated the painting more deeply, she began to reflect on what she wasn’t seeing.
“If you think about seeing trees out in the woods versus a tree that grows in a park, a tree that grows in a park has a really, really big canopy, because there’s no pressures on it from other trees around it,” Brandes says. “And so, it can really grow to its full width. Whereas trees that grow in a forest are much smaller, and much skinnier, and have a much smaller canopy.”
To Brandes, the painting’s landscape featuring slim trees is “an indication of a forest that used to be there.”
“A lot of the trees were cleared, and the other shrubs and plant material were all taken away,” she says. “And what’s left are these kind of skinny trees that feel almost a little bit out of place now; they’re kind of exposed. And so, it started to make me think more about what else has been lost there. What kinds of animals or insects or other plants, the whole ecosystem that existed there in a forest? So even though it seems on the surface it’s very serene, I started to think about it in a way with a sense of loss for natural habitat.”
The youngest member of the panel, 21-year-old climate activist and White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council member Jerome Foster II, chose Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s The Lute (1904) as one of his subjects, writing that “this seemingly tranquil painting” makes him feel “a sense of anxiety rather than calm.” The painting depicts four women in dresses surrounded by a greenish fog as one of them plays the lute. For Foster, taking in the painting 120 years after its creation, the scene reminds him that the human toll on the environment “is often dissonant and exploitative, a tension that the corporate practice of greenwashing obscures by seducing consumers with illusions of sustainability.”
Of course, many viewers might strain to find any contemporary message in a painting so apparently in conversation with antiquity. That’s the whole point, Greenwold says.
“The notion that you can in fact bring your own personal or professional vantage, and that there’s value in having that as a way in which you appreciate these works of art, is an important thing.”
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