Landscape painter Thomas McNickle admitted that combing through the Butler Institute of American Art's collection to put together a show of landscapes was like letting a kid loose in a candy store.

And like a kid, McNickle chose what he liked.

"I didn't have any lofty curatorial considerations," he said of the show at the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, New Castle. "Most of the stuff grabbed me right away."

Kimberly Koller-Jones, Hoyt executive director, said she didn't want McNickle to follow a "purely academic selection process."

"We're not in a purely academic area," she said.

While anyone interested in the academic side of painting will find themes to latch onto in the 34 oil and watercolor paintings and two ink drawings, McNickle said he wanted a show that was neither intimidating nor inaccessible, which he said is what many people think of art.

"I wanted to pick a show where anyone could walk into this show and think, 'Gee, that's really pretty,'" said McNickle, of Wilmington Township, Lawrence County.

McNickle picked works that would be familiar to frequent visitors of the Butler's main branch in Youngstown, such as John Carlson's "Sylvan Stream" and Bruce Crane's "November Lowlands," and many pieces that he discovered for the first time when he rummaged through the vaults.

"I'd say, half I'd never seen before," he said. "A lot of them are not incredibly significant historically."

Carlson, however, remains an immensely significant figure.

"This guy was incredible," McNickle said. Noting Carlson's 1916 work "Sylvan Stream," showing a snow scene, McNickle said, "That's a major Carlson, right from his vintage period."

Carlson also taught, making him influential beyond his work, and his book, "Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting" is still used by teachers.

Crane, represented by "November Lowlands," was known as a tonalist. He liked the soft, diffused light of early morning and late in the day, McNickle said.

"November Lowlands" shows a brown meadow dominated by the yellowish skin of an overcast sky.

Alfred Thompson Bricher's "Rocky Shore," in which grass-covered hill towers over a calm inlet, was an easy choice.

"Whenever you see a Bricher or someone like that, you grab it right away," McNickle said. "If it's in a major museum collection, it can't be bad."

The Butler's collection is strong in the period of the late 1800s to the early 1900s. American landscape became a significant subject for painters during that time, and the influence of the first great American landscape movement, the Hudson River School, was giving way to regional schools.

"This was their passion," McNickle said. "They believed in landscape and felt very strongly that American landscape was worthy of painting."

Actually, it didn't have to be American landscape, as scenes from Europe and Australia attest.

As landscape was taking hold in America, the French Impressionists were changing both the look of a landscape painting and the way of painting it.

American artists responded by completing entire paintings out of doors instead of working up from sketches in a studio, and reinterpreting light.

Albert Leroy Groll's "Symphony in Green" shows Impressionism creeping into landscape, while Harriet Randall Lumis embraced it in "Upland Pasture," McNickle said.

But art movements did not change the focus of landscape painting.

"The landscape, for many of these painters, was a very spiritual endeavor," McNickle said. "A lot of these paintings were going hand in hand with the industrialization of America, and the feeling of something disappearing."

Materials, techniques and styles change over time, but pieces by modern painters such as Wolf Kahn, Donald Holden and Charles Basham show that landscape remains a spiritual endeavor.

"Historically, that's been the mainstay of art, that kind of transcendent quality of connecting with something that's larger than you."

"American Artists in Landscape: Selections from the Butler Institute of American Art" will be up through Feb. 28. It is augmented by landscapes from the Hoyt collection, and furniture reproductions by James Moose. The Hoyt is offering a program for school groups that covers the artists and painting movements. Information: (724) 652-2882 and www.hoytartcenter.org