Gary Romain

2009 · réf. 61301bd — Daytona Beach Florida: The Museum of Arts and Sciences 2009. First Edition. Squar quarto gold cloth hardcover gilt letters 184 pp. Fine in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: Since Bartram’s time the romantic spirit has been a vital part of the South’s self-image. Florida remains Southern in its romanticism and its faith in nature and renewal. The landscape and genre paintings of the Brown Collection express the vital relationship between a land and its people with a spirit of imagination and optimism that remains classically Southern.” from the essay “Local Color: Florida as a Southern Place” by Jay Williams Curator of Art Morris Museum of Art. Reflections: Paintings of Florida 1865 - 1865 illustrates in full color a generous selection of important paintings many new to the field of scholarship by some of the most significant artists who worked in the Sunshine State between 1865 and 1965. The book contains an essay entitled “Local Colr: Florida as a Southern Place” by Jay Williams Curator of Art at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta Georgia. Here Williams helps to explain the flowering of fine art in the South and the unique place that Florida played in that development. David Swoyer guest curator for the publication contributes an essay entitled “Floridaness: Finding the State in the Art.” Swoyer carefully explains how artists used pictorial elements of the man-built and natural Florida environment in their paintings to help geographically locate the subject of each work while also adding a poetic layer of meaning to each artist’s finished product. Essays by Gary R. Libby on each artist represented in this book present a current and authoritative biographical historical cultural and aesthetic analysis of each work designed to help the reader appreciate these important cultural objects in context. An essay “The Collectors” explores the creation and maturation of a world-class collection of Florida paintings and the individuals and events that helped to shape the collection of Cici and Hyatt Brown which now numbers well over 1500 items and contains some of the most important known paintings of Florida many new to the fields of scholarship and connoisseurship. The Museum of Arts and Sciences, (2009). First Edition. hardcover