Twenty-nine paintings from the Masterworks Foundation's Bermudiana Collection will next be seen in an innovative exhibition to be presented by the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College in May.

The exhibition, whose concept arose out of last September's terrorist attacks in the US and is entitled `In a Perfect World: Bermuda in the context of American Landscape Painting,' will examine how American painters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries turned to idealised landscapes, both in their own country and Bermuda, to find comfort in troubling times.

"This is the first exhibition to examine thematic links between paintings of an idealised American and Bermudian landscape by many of the finest artists working in North America from the mid-nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century," said McMullen Museum director and professor of art history Nancy Netzer. "It is our hope that this probing of the beautiful in painting might provide to viewers the comfort, solace and place of refuge from a troubled world that it did for our ancestors."

In all, 55 paintings by such prominent artists as William Sontag, John Enneking, George Inness, John LaFarge, Sanford Gifford, Charles Demuth, Albert Gleizes, Marsden Hartley, Winslow Homer and Georgia O'Keefe are to be exhibited in what organisers describe as "an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the style, subject matter and interpretations of representative works".

The exhibition will comprise two sections, the first featuring oil or watercolour paintings beginning with those of the Hudson River School, and including later nineteenth century Luminist, Tonalist, and Impressionist interpretations. Through these, viewers will see how American artists responded to times of national crises and tension by producing works that seemed to offer a glimpse of a better world.

The second section will mainly feature paintings from the Masterworks Foundation's Bermudiana Collection. Depicting the sun, sea, vegetation, architecture and people of Bermuda from the late nineteenth century to the present, they reflect how artists from Canada, the US and France travelled to the Island in search of renewed tranquility and respite from the accelerating pace of increasingly urbanised life.

The artists brought with them inherited traditions as well as knowledge of new and exciting European approaches, including Cubist structure and Fauve colour, and their Bermuda paintings represented a confluence of these varied sources coupled with local inspiration.

The McMullen Museum is the latest in a series of North American venues to exhibit paintings from the Masterworks Foundation's Bermudiana Collection. Invited guests for the opening reception on May 15 will include Sir John and Lady Swan. Masterworks' founding chairman Tom Butterfield and curator Elise Outerbridge will also be present, as will the Bermuda Strollers. A lecture will be given by exhibition curator Judith Bookbinder, who is an American art scholar and Boston College Fine Arts Department faculty member.