Seeking the ideal

"Formally trained at the National Academy of Design in New York, Charles Courtney Curran proved his talent early in his career by winning the third Halgarten Prize at the Academy's annual juried exhibition in 1888 for his painting, A Breezy Day (1887). He used the prize money to finance a move to Paris in 1889 to study painting and refine his skills. Curran returned to the United States in 1891 and established a studio in New York that remained active for the next fifty years. In the summer of 1903 he travelled to Cragsmoor, New York, home to a vibrant artist colony. He later built a summer home there and used the area's majestic vistas as inspiration for his work. Curran enjoyed a long and successful career over which he created more than 800 works of art. Charles Courtney Curran: Seeking the Ideal is the first retrospective of the artist since his death in 1942. The work of Charles Courtney Curran reflects the aesthetic movements that influenced American art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--naturalism, Symbolism, and perhaps the most evident, Impressionism. The exhibition mirrors the artist's progression through these influences while revealing the beautiful luminosity consistent in all of his canvases and his versatility as an artist. His pursuit of ideal beauty was not only achieved by painting elegant subjects, but also through the careful organization of his compositions, his handling of symbolic light, his thoughtful approach to proportion and format, and especially through his impeccable painting technique." -- Dixon Gallery and Garden's website.