Ithaca's Johnson Museum hosts student-led staffage exhibit
The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca is hosting a new student-led installation focused on small figures in landscape paintings. The exhibit explores how tiny figures, known as “staffage,” indicate scale and tell larger stories about the art.
In the tradition of European landscape painting, staffage figures “give the painting a sense of depth, but also a possibility of narrative, some kind of literary component,” said Benjamin Anderson, associate professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies in the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences, who taught a fall 2025 Society for the Humanities seminar that inspired the installation.
“The general idea was that the entire painting was executed and then the staffage was added,” Anderson said. “In fact, some painters didn’t do their own staffage.”
More at https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/02/museum-installation-focuses-small-figures-large-landscapes. Cornell University is at Johnson Museum of Art.
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