ADAM BRIMER/NEWS SENTINEL Louis Edward Jones’ smock and paintbrush can bee seen along with his work in the Museum of East Tennessee History’s exhibit “Mountain Splendor: Art and Artists of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1850-1950.” The exhibit features work by artists inspired by the Smokies and runs until Oct. 4.

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Some 60 paintings, sketches and photographs of the scenes and people of the Smoky Mountains are part of a new exhibit at the Museum of East Tennessee History.

“Mountain Splendor: Art and Artists of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1850-1950” includes works created by more than two dozen artists. The earliest work is a large oil on canvas painting done in 1877 by artist E.T.H. Foster. The painting of two men and a white dog along a rock-filled mountain stream is titled “Evening on the French Broad, N.C.”

The exhibit is at the museum, part of the East Tennessee History Center, through Oct. 4. Some of the art belongs to the history center. Other pieces belong to Knox County Public Library’s Calvin M. McClung Collection. Still others are loaned from museums in North Carolina and Tennessee, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and private collectors.

Many paintings show landscapes of similar, often unnamed vistas. Their rolling mountains, green hills and tall trees appear comfortingly familiar. A simple mountain scene Smokies guide Wiley Oakley painted to sell tourists to his Gatlinburg shop is included. Nearby is the 1930 oil painting professional architect Charles McGhee Cowan Jr. did of Oakley’s mountain cabin.

Painter Hugh Tyler was known for his marine landscapes. But the uncle of writer James Agee painted an untitled oil showing the Smokies’ blue-hued majesty. Longtime Knoxville art teacher and artist Mary Grainger’s untitled landscape was done in pastels in 1942. A large oil Dayton artist James G. Hughes painted of a French Broad River scene is eye catching. The self-taught Hughes traveled around painting murals and furniture before his death in 1940.

The exhibit includes several works by artists known for their relationship to the mountains. Among them are photographers Jim Thompson and George Masa and painters Charles Krutch and Louis E. Jones. Photos made by Thompson and Masa in the early 20th century helped convince lawmakers to create the GSMNP.

“Mountain Splendor” includes some of Jones’ oil paintings and etchings. He came to Gatlinburg in 1933 from New York to paint and open his Cliff Dwellers shop. The original wooden shop sign of two hillbillies that Jones made hangs under his paintings. Krutch, who died in 1934, was an amateur Knoxville painter. The exhibit includes his large oil “Chimney Tops From Bear Pen Hollow” and five small, delicate watercolors of mountains, streams and trees.

The exhibit also shows four pen-and-ink works and two oil paintings by Fuller Potter, who later became famous as an abstract expressionist painter. While visiting the Smokies in the 1930s, Potter, 26, fell in love and married a 15-year-old Cocke County girl. Before the couple divorced in 1942, he created realistic views of the mountains and its people.

“Mountain Splendor” is the second of two museum exhibitions celebrating the GSMNP’s 75th anniversary. Steve Cotham, manager of the McClung Collection, was the exhibit’s guest curator.

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel
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