Ordinarily, a summer show of landscapes that consists almost entirely of works by a gallery’s stable would not seem worthy of a press release, let alone a critical review. And for Salander-O’Reilly, luxuriant painterly hedonism of the kind exuded by the majority of the works on view in “Scapes/Landscapes” is very much business as usual. But this judicious selection of two dozen artists, generally ranging from the first decades of the last century to this year, is worth a trip uptown.

The gallery has gathered choice examples of several major American landscape artists of the 20th century. The showstopper is a pairing of works that both truly belong in museums. “July” (1971), which may be (at 100 inches by 80 inches) Fairfield Porter’s largest canvas, dominates one of the upstairs rooms. Facing it across the landing in a second gallery is Jane Freilicher’s “Late Summer” (1968), an opulent, magisterial Long Island landscape. What is disarming about both pictures is their scale, for neither artist is creating anything like a splashy color field, nor are their respective visions monumental.

“July,” actually a second version of a work in the collection of the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, depicts the artist’s brother and sister and their respective spouses seated on Adirondack chairs at the family camp in Maine. Its prodigious dimensions do nothing to diminish Porter’s essentially interior values or the complex temper of his work. Like his avatar, the Symbolist Vuillard, Porter allows neither scale nor the depiction of the outdoors to diminish the privacy and bourgeois quietude of his hallmark intimism.

At first, the work seems disarmingly cozy and familiar, true to the season of its title in the way it treats light and heat. The paint delivery, too, varies from leisurely to dazed in a way that seems right for July. Yet the contrastive speeds and attentions throughout the painting – trees stylized in their gestural fluency, chairs almost cramped in their meticulous rendering – echoes the anxiety of figures caught between formal self-consciousness and languor.

A similar tension between detail and whole gives a subdued energy to Ms. Freilicher’s painting, which was probably made sur le motif from the picture window of her Hamptons residence. For all its lush palette and succulent impasto, there is, as ever with this artist, a slightly awkward tentativeness that contrasts with, say, Paul Georges’s bravura interpretation of a similar scene in “Small Roses” (1981) in the next room.

Still, Ms. Freilicher falls short of the clipped angst that comes across from the densely observed foliage of the British painter Christopher Bramham, whose work, “Railway Embankment, Summer” (1992), is placed next to hers. A close follower of Lucian Freud’s nature studies, Mr. Bramham has made an overgrown South London viaduct his Mont Sainte-Victoire. But the thin red lines of metal railing spied in the distance, which accent the verdant bramble beneath, are pure Constable, not Cezanne.

An intense, richly obsessive street scene by Stanley Lewis, “Serio’s Pharmacy” (2005), and a monumental industrial riverscape by Rackstraw Downes, “A Bend in the Hackensack at Jersey City” (1986), form another auspicious pairing. They share an unremitting sense that truth is in the detail; both painters are empiricists whose ethic of accuracy is linked to what they can actually see rather than what something is supposed to look like. Mr. Lewis revels in his own theatrical struggle to find the image, while Mr. Downes favors a sustained deadpan, but both provide the excitement that comes from a personal reinvention of perspective.

The show offers a robust balance of painters who work directly from life and others who create a studio synthesis of observation and perception. Often this juxtaposition is instructive. Louisa Matthiasdottir’s undated “Five Sheep in Landscape,” while informed by acute observation, is a studio invention, the sheep pulsating little emblems of themselves. Gregory Botts’s “Trujillo’s Hill #2” (2000), by contrast, has an energy that comes from investment in the directly observed.

Matthiasdottir keeps company with fellow Hans Hofmann pupils Paul Resika and Robert De Niro Sr., whose “Provincetown Landscape,” (1968) is a miraculous reminder of how Fauvism grew out of Cezanne despite the exuberance of the former and the containment of the latter. Though fast and dashed off, the De Niro is built around a meticulous geometry. A flamboyant arabesque of a tree unwittingly looks like a clenched fist, adding literal and metaphorical punch to the composition.

While the kind of Southern, Mediterranean pleasure principle personified by Mr. Resika dominates the show, there are plenty of reminders of the northern vision of landscape, where botany and geology are tempered by metaphysics. A couple of visionary little studies by Albert Kresch from the last two years are sandwiched by an Alfred Maurer Fauve landscape of around 1912 and a Milton Avery seascape, “Evening Bay” (1959). Latter-day symbolists Gregory Amenoff and Gregory Gillespie keep company with an early Louis Eilshemius gem, “Chesapeake Bay” (1889), which manages at once to be pure Hudson River School and Bonnardian before Bonnard. This finds a curious echo in an intense little Graham Nickson sunset, which almost seems to be chromatically fuming about its position behind the gallery director’s desk.

Until August 26 (20 E. 79th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-879-6606). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices.