The story of this hall
The most-viewed paintings in American history never hung in a museum. They hung over the sofa: the mountain lake at sunset, the covered bridge in autumn, the cabin with one lit window - the same landscape, more or less, in a million living rooms. It arrived by every channel commerce could invent: paint-by-number kits that sold the making of art as a hobby in the 1950s; sofa-size oils moved by the hundred at starving-artist hotel-ballroom sales; calendar plates and Home Interiors prints; and finally a soft-spoken man on public television teaching the whole country happy little trees, wet-on-wet, in twenty-six minutes. Critics never came. The paintings did not care. They were not about art; they were about having a window that always looked out on somewhere better. This hall hangs the view over America's couch. There is no far shore; the lake ends at the wall. Walk back out through the frame you came in by.
1950–1995
