Flower Girl in Holland
George Hitchcock
An item at Art Institute of Chicago
After studying in London, Paris, and at the Hague, George Hitchcock settled in 1884 in the Netherlands, living and working for twenty years in Egmond. Attracted to the region's landscape and peasant communities, the artist specialized in scenes featuring women in traditional dress set among voluptuous, blooming flowers. Here Hitchcock revised the environment behind the Dutch flower seller, editing out other houses nearby in favor of a bucolic vista. Although he employed academic techniques such as fine modeling of his figures, Hitchcock nevertheless earned a reputation as a daring colorist for the brilliant hues and open brushwork that likewise characterize his compositions.
Americas in the Making
An exhibit at Art Institute of Chicago
These galleries present dynamic and wide-ranging art forms made in the Americas, where artists have been at work since time immemorial. The region now known as Chicago has long been a vibrant center of Native artistic practices, including those of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations. European settler colonialism and the development of the metropolis-including our museum's founding in 1879-introduced global art forms. Together, these local histories shape the collections we steward today, which encompass diverse makers, objects, and styles spanning centuries and continents, from North to South America and the Caribbean. The works here offer layered stories of the Americas in the making. Created for a variety of purposes-from aesthetic to ceremonial to practical —they have the power to evoke a range of emotions and responses. Complex factors impacted their making, including displacement and immigration, enslavement, global trade, and indus-trialization. As a result, they offer insights across eras while inviting reinterpretation in our moment. Just as artistic traditions are continually made and remade, so, too, are our efforts to present them. Today you can find selections of the many histories of art in the Americas on this floor and the floor above, in tandem with Gallery 136, a dedicated space for celebrating Indigenous art.