Friends of the Susquehanna River Art Collection
Friends of the Susquehanna River Art Collection
Introduction
The Susquehanna River Art Collection celebrates the creative legacy of the artists who have lived, worked or been inspired by the beauty and history of the Susquehanna River and its watershed. The Collection has been more than a decade in the making, founded by artist and curator Rob Evans and arts patron and philanthropist James Snyder.
The Friends of the Susquehanna River Art Collection was founded as a non-profit entity in May 2025 to grow, care for, and interpret the collection, fostering an appreciation for the river’s history, beauty, and imperative of environmental stewardship to preserve and protect this landscape for future generations. Under the auspices of the Friends, with Evans as Chief Curator and with the support of a Collections Committee comprised of museum professionals, scholars, and collectors, SRAC has grown to comprise more than 200 works, including acquisition of important paintings by George Beck, Thomas Doughty, Jasper Cropsey, Herman Herzog, Paul Weber, Robert Henri, Franz Kline, prints by Audubon, Thomas Hart Benton and many others. The ultimate goal for the Friends is to firmly establish the importance of this Collection and the narrative it embraces by creating a fully professional art museum in Columbia, PA.
Under this leadership team, the Friends of the Susquehanna River Art Collection will ensure that:
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The Collection is enhanced and expanded through careful stewardship and scholarship
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Many voices and artistic perspectives are represented to tell the full story of the River’s creative legacy and contemporary meaning
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Scholarship in American art history and the role the art and artists of the Susquehanna River has played will continue through exhibitions, programs, and publications.
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Educational partnerships are developed in collaboration with the Lancaster Conservancy and the Susquehanna National Heritage Area to enhance community engagement
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The development of a dedicated art museum meets professional standards
The Susquehanna River Art Collection on view in the exhibit "American Identity: Restoring the Susquehanna River's Artistic Legacy" at the Susquehanna Art Museum in 2026
Background
For the last two decades Pennsylvania artist Rob Evans has embarked on an exciting journey exploring his roots as a painter of the Susquehanna River Valley. In so doing, he has uncovered a long forgotten but important artistic legacy of national significance, curating two major touring exhibits, and building, with the assistance of art patron James Snyder, a permanent collection of Susquehanna River art, spanning four centuries, which includes over 200 paintings, drawings, etchings, engravings, lithographs, illustrated books, maps and decorated china. The collection chronicles the unfolding of American history along the Susquehanna's shores, from first contact with Native populations in the early 17th century all the way to the construction of dams and power plants nearly 400 years later. In addition to impressive easel paintings meant for exhibition halls and
wealthy patrons homes, this collection also includes a diverse array of works showing how artists disseminated their art to a broad public via commercial partnerships, utilizing the most current printing technologies available, not only self-promoting, but helping make the Susquehanna one of the most popular and well known rivers worldwide.
George Beck, McCall's Ferry on the Susquehanna, watercolor and gouache on paper, c.1800
After Jasper Cropsey, American Autumn, Starucca Valley, Erie R. Road, 19 color chromolithograph, c.1867
Before its transformation into a major industrial corridor, the Susquehanna River watershed served as a vital incubator for early nineteenth-century American landscape painting. Inspired in part by James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823) set at the river’s headwaters, artists such as Thomas Doughty and Thomas Cole found along the Susquehanna a foundational canvas for celebrating a sublime, untamed natural order. This early aesthetic helped forge the groundwork for what critics would retrospectively designate as the Hudson River School—America’s first major native landscape movement, which articulated a burgeoning national identity tied to the spiritual sanctity of nature. By mid-century, Susquehanna imagery appeared regularly in some of the most important and popular cultural and scientific publications of the day, including books, newspapers, portfolios, and on transferware china in middle class households around the globe. The nation's top painters returned again and again to its shores creating some of the most iconic images of the era such as Jasper Cropsey's American Autumn, Starucca Valley. As mid-nineteenth-century industrialization accelerated, the Susquehanna basin was eventually recast from a pristine sanctuary into a central arena for Leo Marx’s "machine in the garden"—the sudden, disruptive intrusion of modern technology into an idealized pastoral landscape.
After Thomas Cole, The Headwaters of the Juniata, red transferware ceramic soup plate produced by William Adams and Sons, Staffordshire, England, c.1831-61
Currier and Ives, The Valley of the Susquehanna, hand-colored lithograph, c.1870s
While the Hudson River School tradition often sought to ignore or paint around the advance of commercial infrastructure, the unique topography and economic reality of the Susquehanna watershed forced an unprecedented aesthetic reconciliation. This divergence in subject matter was structurally and economically driven. Unlike the Hudson River, which operated primarily as a deep, navigable commercial highway flanking established mercantile centers, the non-navigable, rocky, shallow waters of the Susquehanna sat directly atop the world's richest anthracite coal deposits and sliced through the rugged gaps of the Appalachian Ridge-and-Valley province. This unique topography made the Susquehanna watershed an absolute geographic necessity for land-based rail networks, which were required to navigate its river gaps and mountain passes to extract raw energy and transport it across the country. Because the watershed became the actual physical site of aggressive natural resource extraction and heavy corporate engineering, it was far better situated than the Hudson to serve as a potent, immediate subject for artists exploring the violent collision of technology and the region's foundational agrarian identity.
Unlike any other American river system, the Susquehanna and its immediate industrial tributaries became the definitive crucible where the machine and the garden were welded into a cohesive, enduring visual mythology. By demanding a visual vocabulary that could simultaneously process sweeping river vistas and heavy industrial extraction, the Susquehanna basin broke the romantic spell of early American landscape painting. As the rapid expansion of Pennsylvania railroads fractured the pastoral ideal, the iron horse carved its way into the watershed, forcing artists to move past an untouchable wilderness and confront a national identity built on steam, coal, and corporate capital. In doing so, the valley laid the specific conceptual groundwork for the gritty realism, industrial printmaking, and eventual raw abstraction that defined its artistic output throughout the 20th century.
Daniel Garber, The Conowingo Dam, offset lithograph, 1939
Adolph Gottlieb, Coal Pickers, lithograph,1937
Already, the Friends have succeeded in meeting the aspirational goals set in May of 2025 to:
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Illuminate the importance of the Susquehanna River Valley to American art history within the context of a national—even global—period of massive historical sociological, economic and political change.
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Explore and interpret the narrative of what has been understood about the region and the artists the River inspired.
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Position the Susquehanna River artists within a larger, embracing context and solidify the River’s historical and cultural identity extending beyond the region.
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Build awareness to drive community engagement at all levels.
It has long been Evans’ dream to coalesce these collections of Susquehanna River art into a museum dedicated to the river's important legacy, much like the Brandywine River Museum celebrates that river's important heritage.
To facilitate that dream, the Friends of the Susquehanna River Art Collection is now working towards establishing a dedicated art museum. While the permanent museum is in the planning and
Friends of the Susquehanna River Art Collection and a new museum for Susquehanna River Art
Drawing on the Susquehanna Collection on view at the farmhouse galleries at the Ingrid Graham Historic Hellam Nature Preserve
Concept rendering for the renovated 22 S. 2nd Street Gallery location in Columbia
In the next phase of our journey, we have acquired the historic building at 22 S. 2nd Street in Columbia. Following renovation, we we will develop a robust program that connects works currently housed in the Hellam Preserve with those installed in the new building, creating a two-site journey across the river. Primarily housing historical work at Hellam Preserve and 20th-century-onward work in Columbia lets visitors see the river's landscape firsthand, pairing the Preserve's pastoral setting with Columbia's industrial character, with each location weighted toward, but not limited to, the era and themes most connected to it. We will develop a self-guided tour connecting both towns, their collections, and local amenities.
development stages, the collection is housed at the Ingrid Graham Historic Hellam Nature Preserve owned by the Lancaster Conservancy, whose extraordinary efforts preserving thousands of acres of Susquehanna watershed blends perfectly with the mission of the Friends, where it is available for viewing by appointment and for educational and interpretive programming created in partnership with the Friends, the Lancaster Conservancy, Susquehanna National Heritage Area and other organizations promoting art, history and environmental stewardship.
