Women rule the landscape – then and now – in Cole exhibits

There are two coordinated exhibitions at hand. In the New Studio, “Susie Barstow and Her Circle” opens up the expansive career of Barstow, along with many other 19th-century female landscape painters. And in the original Cole House and Old Studio, “Contemporary Practices” takes the somber historic interiors and spikes them with inventive, politically imbued and often physically lush artworks by more than a dozen women artists working today.

 Barstow rightfully basks in the limelight. Her landscapes were fully a part of the Hudson River School universe begun by Thomas Cole in the 1820s, though she worked decades later, after the Civil War. Her scenes, whether densely wooded seclusions or broad views with plays of light over pristine waters, are as gorgeous as they are conventional. All her works here are detailed and nuanced, showing the compositions and coloristic flourishes of truly excellent oil painting —she taught as well as practiced — exploring many small dramas and welcoming airs without compromise.

An early example is “Wooded Interior,” with dark shadows and heavy growth supporting a more luminous stand of birches, the far away sky poking through high branches. You can almost smell the rich soil and hear the bare murmur of a small stream just out of sight. Or so I imagine the buyers of these small landscapes feeling when they put them — and Barstow made many of them — in their parlors in 1865 (in this case). Likewise, the romantic “Night in the Wood” from…