The National Gallery of Ireland yesterday began cranking up its publicity machine for the successor to its sell-out Impressionist exhibition, which brought over 120,000 visitors into its new Millennium Wing following its opening last January.
It is a truth universally acknowledged in the museum world that a gallery in possession of some Impressionist paintings will have no problem in attracting an audience. But now the National Gallery aims to woo the punters with "American Beauty", a cleverly titled survey of American painting and sculpture.
The work in the show spans 150 years, from the colonial 1770s to the emergence of the home-grown Ash Can school in the first two decades of the 20th century.
There are actually some Impressionists included, albeit of the American variety, and their names are unlikely to trip off the tongue. In fact, the relative unfamiliarity of most of the American artists is likely to make this exhibition a tougher one to sell.
Still, "American Sublime", which has just finished at Tate Britain in London and featured many of the same painters, proved to be surprisingly successful at drawing the crowds. And the National Gallery Director, Mr Ray Keaveney, is nothing if not upbeat, labelling the show as "stunning".
As with the Impressionists, the unique selling point is that nothing like this has been seen in Ireland before.
Ms Fionnuala Croke, Head of Exhibitions, points out that we will be the first people in Europe to see it before it travels on to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the American Museum in Giverny.
All 80 paintings and 10 sculptures are from the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, which boasts one of the best representative collections of American art in the world.
If there is an underlying narrative thrust to what is a kaleidoscopic exhibition it is the story of how American artists struggled to articulate a sense of the country's evolving independent identity, from colonial status via Civil War to emergent superpower.
While it features such well known expatriate painters as James McNeill Whistler and the society portrait painter John Singer Sargent, even those who stayed at home looked to Europe for stylistic inspiration.
Yet in the hands of Thomas Cole and Jasper Cropsey of the Hudson Riven School, something distinctively American did begin to emerge, and by the time of Winslow Homer and the Ash Can artists American art was well on the way to cultural maturity.
"American Beauty" is at the National Gallery of Ireland from June 12th to September 1st. The basic admission cost is €10 (with various concessions). Tickets can be booked via Ticketmaster at 1890 925120 or online at www.ticketmaster.ie
