“Coming of Age”, a new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, tells the story of American art as it developed from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Starting with the Hudson River School, exemplified by the landscapes of Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, the show culminates in the Abstract Expressionism of Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. A large majority of the seventy or so exhibits are paintings, although room has been found for a delicate mobile by Alexander Calder and a sabre-toothed man-trap of a sculpture by David Smith. All the works have been drawn from the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, which is on the campus of the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachussetts – one of the leading university galleries in America, with one of the strongest collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art.

The exhibition is a miscellany, although it has its own form of internal consistency, reflecting the fact that the Addison Gallery’s collection was originally shaped by a desire to chart – or at any rate explore – what might be described as the Americanness of American art. Much of the work has a self-questioning and exploratory quality. American painters knew that they were pioneers, the frontiersmen of a new art for a young nation. That knowledge could breed in them either a mood of defiant independence or an habitual sense of insecurity. As a result, their art has a tendency to veer between aggressive indifference to European tradition and a timid dependence on it.

The show begins with the work of a generation of painters for whom the American landscape was a touchstone. America, they believed, was the closest thing on earth to the Eden from which Adam and Eve so long...

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