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The Honolulu Advertiser

Updated at 1:58 p.m., Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Bishop Museum's art collection to get new home in '08

News Release

Bishop Museum's premiere collection of art about Hawai'i will finally get a new home when renovations for the new, as yet unnamed, Picture Gallery are completed in January 2008. For more than 70 years, the collection has been unseen and unknown to the greater Hawai'i community because the Museum lacked appropriate gallery spaces for displaying the unrivaled collection.

At a recent fundraiser held with Morton's The Steakhouse Honolulu, the Museum raised $36,000 to be used to prepare art works for display in the new gallery next year.

Bishop Museum's collection of visual art of Hawai'i and the

Pacific focuses on art from the 18th and early 19th centuries. This collection represents a window into the past—a visual documentation of Pacific cultures at the time of western contact and beyond. The earliest pieces are those of artists associated with voyaging expeditions of the 18th and 19th centuries, including John Webber — the artist for Captain Cook — and Louis Choris, the artist for the French explorer Louis

Von Kotzebue.

Bishop Museum's art collection includes approximately 250 oil paintings and 4,000 works of art on paper. Notable artists represented in the collection include: British painter George Carter (1737-1794); Titian Ramsay Peale (1799-1885); international portrait painter Enoch Wood Perry (1831-1915); maritime artist William A. Coulter (1849-1936), John Joseph Strong (1852-1899), and volcano artist David Howard Hitchcock (1861-1943).