Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, slated to open in 2010 in Bentonville, has made public three more paintings in its collection:
George Wesley Bellows “Excavation at Night,” Maria Oakey Dewing’s “Rose Garden,” and Samuel F.B. Morse’s “Marquis de Lafayette.” The three are on loan to other venues, the Bellows to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Dewing to the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Morse at the New York Historical Society.
“Rose Garden” (shown above), some quick research found, was sold at auction in 2000 at Sotheby’s New York for a record price for a Dewing painting, $1.16 million. Alice Walton has been quietly collecting American works of the 19th and early 20th century for the museum, which she is building on Walton property in the center of Bentonville.
The announcement noted the collaboration between Crystal Bridges and museums across the country. Nineteen works in Walton’s collection, perhaps 10 percent, have been revealed.