Note: L. Kent Wolgamott is participating in the International Arts Journalism Institute in the Visual Arts. This column is adapted from one of the pieces he wrote for the program.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - In the late 1800s, the Haydon Art Club began bringing paintings and sculpture by well-known artists from New York to Lincoln for exhibition and possible purchase.

The acquisitions from those "purchase shows," which continued into the 1950s, form the core of the permanent collection of the Sheldon Museum of Art.

At the same time, a nearly identical process was taking place in Washington, D.C., at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

As with Sheldon, the mission of the Corcoran, the largest privately supported cultural institution in the nation's capital, calls for the gallery to be "dedicated to art and used solely for the purpose of encouraging the American genius."

The parallels between the collections are uncanny, an indicator that, as is the case today, there was a preferred list of "museum quality" artists throughout the 20th century.

In fact, walking into the Corcoran's American galleries with Sheldon's collection in mind is almost eerie.

Perhaps the most telling similarity between the institutions is that the signature painting of each is by Edward Hopper, the best known and most popular of the early American modernists.

Sheldon's Hopper is the iconic "Room in New York" (1932), a view through a window of a man and woman disconnected in the same apartment.

The Corcoran's Hopper, 1939's "Ground Swell," a painting of a sailboat powering against rolling waves next to a bobbing buoy, is atypical of the common perception of Hopper.

"Ground Swell" is in a room that is close to a matched set with Sheldon's early modernist collection - as if each institution worked from an all-star check list.

Arthur Dove, check. Patrick Henry Bruce, check. Mary Cassatt, check.

The most interesting of the Sheldon/Corcoran pairings involves Marsden Hartley.

Sheldon's 1913 "Painting Number One" is an abstraction dominated by a central arch. The Corcoran's "Berlin Abstraction" was painted the following year, using the same basic structure. But its content, based on German army insignia, is a precursor to Hartley's "Portrait of a German Officer" series, one of his most important bodies of work.

Of particular note for Nebraskans at the Corcoran is Robert Henri's "Indian Girl in White Ceremonial Blanket" from 1917, a painting that nearly mirrors "Gypsy Girl in White" from the previous year that is one of 16 paintings by the Nebraska-born artist in Sheldon's collection.

The Henri painting is in a gallery dedicated to "The Eight," aka "The Ashcan School," a group of realist painters largely taught by Henri. The highlight of that room is "42 Kids" by George Bellows, a large, dark-backgrounded 1907 picture of boys in various states of nudity diving off and playing on a crumbling pier in the New York harbor.

Sheldon does not have a Bellows painting. Nor does it own any works by Hudson River painter Frederic Edwin Church, whose spectacular waterfall "Niagara" (1857) dominates half of a wall at the Corcoran.

Sheldon, however, has gems by artists that are not represented on the Corcoran walls, including Georgia O'Keeffe's rare cityscape "New York Nights" (1921) and Joseph Stella's 1913-14 "Battle of Lights, Coney Island." Neither O'Keeffe nor Stella is found in the Corcoran's online listing of its collection.

The Corcoran American galleries don't contain any photography or sculpture, both strengths of Sheldon's early 20th-century collection.

"I don't make any particular claim about the Corcoran being encyclopedic and having no gaps," said Sarah Cash, who curated the Corcoran's American galleries.

Neither does Sheldon, which has long had a "wish list" that includes Church along with post-1945 artists.

The presentation of the work in Sheldon is far different from the Corcoran's, largely because of the architecture of the buildings. The Corcoran is a classic Beaux-Art building; the Sheldon is a temple of high modernism.

But the similarity of the collections and the works on view is striking. That is an indicator of what the museum/art history culture has determined to be "important" American art from the mid-19th to the mid- 20th centuries.

That consensus has evolved through the decades. To some degree, the presence of pivotal works in either collection is a matter of luck - usually through the purchase of the right painting shortly after it was made.

But the movement of artists into and out of the canon is continual, a process that is based on scholarship and academic trend as much as what appears on canvas. However, as the art involved moves past the century mark in age, the movement slows, the canon solidifies and museums such as the Corcoran and Sheldon, half a continent apart, look very much the same.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.