Growing up in Delaware and living for many years in southeastern Pennsylvania, I’ve become familiar with most of the historic regional schools of painting from this part of the eastern seaboard, like the Brandywine School, the New Hope School (otherwise known as the Pennsylvania Impressionists), the Hudson River School, the Ashcan School and others in New York and Boston.

But I was in Lambertville, New Jersey over the weekend, and in talking to Beverly Alverson, a consultant at the Union Gallery, I learned of a regional school of which I was unaware, the Newark School of Painting, a small group of painters centered on the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts (which closed in 1997).

Prominent among those painters were Henry Gasser, Adolf Konrad and John R. Grabach.

Like Gasser, who was his student, Grabach painted in the spirit of the Ashcan School, depicting the gritty everyday reality of workers and tenement life in Newark and New York in a brusque, rough-hewn style much in keeping with his subject matter.

In many of his compositions, Grabach skews perspective and arranges the complexity of cityscapes into strongly geometric formations, giving a sensation of unbalance that suggests the clamor and bustle of city streets.

He also depicted scenes of sailors, ships and docks, as well as painting figurative works.

Grabach is the author of a book on How to Draw the Human Figure, and there are a couple of monographs on his work that are available from used book sources.

Online image resources for Grabach’s work are somewhat scattered, but I’ve assembled what I can below.

When I first came across reproductions of the painting St. Francis in the Desert by Venitian master Giovanni Bellini years ago, my immediate thought was: here is an artist who is constrained by his time to painting religious subjects, but really, really wants to paint landscape.

Seeing that painting in person at the Frick Collection in New York — and again as recently as a few weeks ago — has only reinforced my impression, as has my observation of other works by Bellini.

His often intricate and highly textural landscapes make a striking contrast to his softly luminous and superbly finessed figures.

Though landscape as a subject for painting was present in Greek and Roman murals, it was subsumed into religious and history painting for centuries, not emerging again as an independent subject until the early 16th century in the Netherlands, and the 17th century in Italy and elsewhere.

In the Renaissance, it was Bellini who elevated the place of landscape in religious painting; and despite the fact that he was not a “pure” landscape painter, and that his landscapes were rich with metaphor and religious symbolism, he should be considered one of history’s greatest and most influential landscape artists.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has mounted what promises to be a stunning show of works by Bellini that focuses attention on his landscapes. Though St. Francis in the Desert is not part of the show, there are dazzling works on loan from the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice; Galleria Corsini and Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence; the Louvre and RMN-Grand Palais, Paris; and the National Galleries of Art, London and DC, as well as other public and private collections.

Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice is on view at the Getty Center until January 14, 2018.

There is a book accompanying the exhibition, also available on Amazon: Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice.

There is a show checklist here. Inexplicably, the Getty’s website appears to have limited images from the show to that list and a slideshow of eight images, mostly detail crops. (Why museums don’t take better advantage of images on their websites to generate interest in exhibitions continues to boggle my mind.)

The Los Angeles Times has a review of the show with larger, more complete images.

Those of us who can’t get to the exhibition in person can take it as a jumping off point to explore images of Bellini’s work with appreciation for his landscapes in mind. A good place to start might be the zoomable images on Google Art Project.