Richard Deon: Lincoln’s Campaign to Defeat The Hudson River School

These six monumental woodcuts by Richard Deon, styled like nineteenth-century periodical illustrations, are witty, surreal, and convincingly “historical”—even though they are anything but. Deon’s mysterious woodcuts tell the story of a fictitious monument being relocated from Thomas Cole Mountain to Lincoln, New Hampshire. The star of the title, Abraham Lincoln, armed with a pithy quote about his devotion to truth, is presented as if he were a ship lost at sea—putting us face to face with the fragility of historical truth in an era of expanding means of fictive invention. 

An additional large-scale painting, almost 40 feet wide, by Deon will be on view in The Hyde’s Rotunda Gallery.  

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