Mount Washington stands unmoving and unchanging, except for its seasonal cloaks, yet its very presence has inspired artists, photographers, scientists and adventurers for two centuries.
Mount Washington: The Crown of New England, one of the largest exhibitions in the history of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, is on view through Jan. 16.
The exhibition makes history in other ways, too.
Many of the most important early images of the Mount Washington region are gathered together for the first time, and Albert Bierstadt’s magnificent 10-foot-wide painting, “The Emerald Pool” (1870), returns to New England for the first time since it was painted.
The exhibition includes 146 works of art and related historical objects, including 40 paintings, historic prints, vintage photographs, maps, scientific reports and guidebooks which helped make Mount Washington an international symbol of the beauty and wonder of the American wilderness.
Mount Washington was a popular subject in England and in Europe as well as in the United States. The exhibition got its name from a major painting by George Loring Brown – “The Crown of New England” – which is still in the Royal Collection in London. Brown painted a smaller version, which is in this exhibition, in 1858.
The exhibition is presented in mostly chronological order because, in a spiral of connectedness, tourists, artists, photographers and scientists continually influenced each other.
As tourist destinations like the Hudson Valley and Niagara Falls became popular and crowded, adventurers looked for a more isolated wilderness experience.
Artists such as Thomas Cole (“View in the White Mountains,” 1827), John Kensett (“Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway,” 1851), and Benjamin Champney, (“Meadows, North Conway,” 1851) visited to paint; their paintings inspired more tourists to come.
The tourists and artists themselves became the subjects of paintings and photographs. Winslow Homer’s “The Bridle Path,” 1868, features a woman riding sidesaddle on the rocky trail to the summit. Cole sketches at the foot of a waterfall in Crawford Notch as an onlooker observes his work in Henry Cheever Pratt’s “Thomas Cole Sketching in the White Mountains,” 1828.
Mount Washington had a prominent role in photography’s history.
“We discovered that Mount Washington was one of the earliest subjects for landscape photography in the United States,” said Andrew Spahr, the Currier’s director of collections and exhibitions.
These images attracted still more tourists. The photographs, especially stereographs, which might be called the first 3-D images, became popular as collectibles even for those who never actually traveled to the mountain.
“The Mount Washington summit became a real destination for tourists, especially after the early 1850s when the first hotels were built on the summit,” Spahr said.
It became an accessible wilderness, he said, because of the Summit Road, which opened in 1861, and the Cog Railway, which opened in 1869.
“In the late 1870s, we see artists more interested in ideas of painting atmosphere than painting a specific view,” Spahr said.
In George Inness’s “Mount Washington, North Conway,” (1875), the mountain is still visible, featured in the background of the landscape.
A year later, he painted “Saco Ford: Conway Meadows,” in which the mountain is completely obscured by looming clouds.
“In the 1870s-80s, photographers become more interested in some of these things that the painters are working with,” Spahr said. “It’s more about capturing an effect or a mood and a little less about an exact reproduction of a three-dimensional reality.”
Charles Hibbard, a photographer from Lisbon, recorded cloud views from the summit of Mount Washington, focusing on the weather rather than on the mountain itself.
“We were also interested in looking at how Mount Washington was a focal point for scientific research and scientific discovery,” Spahr said. “In a number of cases, artists and scientists worked together on various projects.”
Botanists, meteorologist and geologists came to study the area’s sub-alpine ecosystem, and asked artists to illustrate their scientific research projects. Artists with up-to-date scientific knowledge also rendered detailed images of rocks, plants and clouds.
Joshua H. Huntington, a geologist who was also interested in meteorology, and his crew of scientists and photographers spent the entire winter of 1870-71 on the mountain studying weather conditions.
Photographers Amos Clough and Howard Kimball risked their lives to obtain photographs of what has been termed the worst weather in the world.
The interactive section of the exhibition features videos of today’s researchers at the summit and the conditions they face as they continue to measure and record the incredible atmospheric conditions.
“A few years later in 1878 there was a huge report on the geology of New Hampshire,” Spahr said, “which was commissioned by the state legislature and produced by Charles H. Hitchcock, who was a state geologist.”
A large-format atlas shows the White Mountains with geological formations described in different colors and shapes, Spahr said. The report, co-authored with Huntington, also included a three-volume publication (more than 2,000 pages) with detailed drawings and information about geology, plant life, distribution of insects in the state, and other topics.
Hitchcock wanted the work to be illustrated to make the technical information more accessible, and to a broader audience beyond earth scientists. A photo showing a person lying down, hold the anemometer to measure the wind speed without getting blown off the mountain, conveys more information about the process than pages of text could.
He also wanted the state’s geological features to be appreciated from an aesthetic viewpoint. For example, images of rock crystals drawn from a microscope are beautiful on their own, separate from the scientific information they contain.
While Mount Washington was named the “Crown of New England,” the crown of this exhibition is “The Emerald Pool.”
It was shown in Boston in 1870 and that’s the last time it was in New England, Spahr said. It traveled to cities across the United States, and in 1873 it traveled to Europe, where it received a medal at the International Exposition in Vienna. It’s now in the collection of the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va.
“It’s the first time it’s been lent in decades by the Chrysler Museum,” Spahr said. “We’re really delighted to have it.”
If you go, tickets are $5 in addition to regular museum admission. For more information, visit currier.org or call 603-669-6144, ext. 108