"Across the Nation" | From the National Gallery of Art

The New Britain Museum of American Art is partnering with the National Gallery of Art for the National Gallery’s “Across the Nation” initiative, which brings key works of art to regional museums across the United States in 2025 and 2026. Through this initiative, works of art by renowned artists from the National Gallery’s collection will be on loan at 10 partner museums in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington, creating unprecedented accessibility to the nation’s masterworks by placing them directly in communities across the country. “Across the Nation” is part of the National Gallery’s programming commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, taking place in 2026, which also includes a series of special installations and exhibitions, on-site programs, and digital content.

As part of the program, the New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA) will receive two works on loan, which will be on view starting in May 2025: Robert Seldon Duncanson’s Fruit Still Life (c. 1849) and Winslow Homer’s East Hampton Beach, Long Island (1874). As one of the few commercially-successful African-American painters in nineteenth-century America, Duncanson is best known for his work in landscape. One of Duncanson’s rare still lives, Fruit Still Life will join the NBMAA’s major landscape painting by the artist—offering an opportunity to feature a fuller perspective on Duncanson and his oeuvre within the context of the NBMAA’s rich collection of historical American painting. Homer’s East Hampton Beach, Long Island captures the spirit of the fast-moving social changes that prevailed in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Paired with NBMAA collection works such as Eastman Johnson’s Hollyhocks (1876), Homer’s Butterflies (1874), and a suite of illustrations by Homer featuring adventure-seeking middle-class women, East Hampton Beach and its companion works in the NBMAA galleries will foreground the changing ways in which American women experienced leisure time in the post-Civil War years.