IMAGES of Bermuda are now fluttering all over a Boston suburb to welcome a new art exhibit that focuses on the island.

In a Perfect World: Bermuda In The Context of American Landscape Painting opened on Wednesday at the Boston College McMullen Museum of Art in Chestnut Hills, Massachusetts.

"Posters of Winslow Homer's paintings of Bermuda are now posted up all over Chestnut Hills," said Elise Outerbridge of the Masterworks Foundation.

The art exhibit will feature 29 works from the Masterworks Foundation's Bermudiana Collection, six works from the McMullen's permanent collection, four from the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, and several others from additional museums and private collections.

"The exhibit will examine how American painters in the 19th and 20th centuries turned to idealised landscapes, both in their own land and in the remote idyllic island environment of Bermuda, to find comfort during troubled times," said Mrs. Outerbridge.

McMullen Museum Director and Professor of Art History Nancy Netzer said the museum was pleased to offer this innovative exhibition conceived in the wake of the tragic events of September 11. "This is the first exhibition to examine thematic links between painters of the idealised American and Bermudian landscape by many of the finest artists working in North America from the mid-19th through the first half of the 20th century," she said.

"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 a Perfect World traces the development of the idealised landscape as a source of comfort in troubled times from the Hudson River School through early 20th-century paintings of Bermuda. The works by noted American artists chosen for the exhibition illustrate a distinct dimension of landscape painting - the search for solace and tranquillity in troubled times.

In the first section of In a Perfect World, paintings done in oil or watercolour demonstrate how in times of tension and crisis, 19th-century American artists constructed an idealised American landscape as an antidote to the problems of the world around them.

"Beginning with paintings of the Hudson River School, and including later 19th-century luminist, tonalists and impressionist interpretations, viewers will see how American artists responded to times of national crisis and tension by producing paintings that seemed to offer a glimpse of a better world," she said.

"The second section will show that many painters working in Bermuda in the early 20th century were also inspired to find comfort and solace in the land."

She said seeking respite from the accelerating pace of increasingly urbanised life, artists from Canada and France and the United States travelled to Bermuda in search of renewed tranquillity.

"They also took with them their inherited traditions as well as knowledge of new and exciting European approaches including Cubist structure and Fauve colour," she said. "The Bermuda works show a confluence of these varied sources under the inspiration of a beneficent land."

This section is comprised largely of works from the Masterworks Foundation's Bermudiana Collection, which depict the sun, sea, vegetation, architecture and people of Bermuda from the late 19th century to the present.

The Boston College exhibition of works from the Bermudiana Collection is the fifth in a series of international exhibitions - the first showings off Bermuda's shores.

Bermudians in the Boston area are being urged to go out and see the exhibition at Boston College. The exhibition closes on September 15.

q For more information in Boston call 617-552-8587.