“Different Views in Hudson River School Painting,” an exhibition at the Babcock Galleries in New York City, organized by the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, has an interesting premise. Curator Judith Hansen O’Toole, director of the Westmoreland Museum, focuses on pairs, series and groupings of paintings as a way of exploring shared iconography and the intimacy between painters and specific locales.

Jacob Collins’s Water Street Atelier has become a magnet for talented artists eager to explore the realist tradition. In March Spanierman Gallery in New York City presented recent paintings by two of Collins’s students, Kate Lehman (b. 1968) and Sarah Lamb (b. 1971), who are doing remarkable work in a variety of genres—still life, landscape, figure, interior. Young artists can be highly resourceful in acquiring the kind of education they feel they need.

The British painter William Nicholson (1872–1949) is largely unknown in the United States, although there was a 1926 gallery show. In the spring Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City rectified this oversight with an exhibition of paintings that look remarkably fresh. Nicholson’s style is modern in the manner of a nineteenth-century modernist such as Whistler or Manet, especially the Manet of those deceptively simple still lifes that are increasingly admired today.

The British painter William Nicholson (1872–1949) is largely unknown in the United States, although there was a 1926 gallery show. In the spring Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City rectified this oversight with an exhibition of paintings that look remarkably fresh. Nicholson’s style is modern in the manner of a nineteenth-century modernist such as Whistler or Manet, especially the Manet of those deceptively simple still lifes that are increasingly admired today.

Julio Valdez (b. 1969), a graduate of the innovative Altos de Chavon School of Design, an affiliate of Parsons School of Design, received the Grand Prix at the XVIII E. Leon Jimenez Biennial in his native Dominican Republic in 2000. An artist-in-residence in the Studio Museum of Harlem in the late 1990s, he now has his own studio in Spanish Harlem, where he also helps to exhibit other artists’ works. Valdez has exhibited internationally, winning the Silver Palette at the Trentième Festival de la Peinture, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France.