Displaying items by tag: romanticism

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute of Williamstown, Mass., will be unveiling a new loan at 1 p.m. this Friday, April 17: Albert Bierstadt’s “Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast,” recently arrived from the Seattle Art Museum.

The famed romantic painting is a temporary visitor in New England thanks to a friendly football wager back in January, when the two museums bet that their respective home team would the Super Bowl. Had the Seahawks beaten the Patriots, the Clark would have shipped off Winslow Homer’s “West Point, Prout’s Neck” for a visit to Seattle.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have acquired the first painting to enter their collections by Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), an artist whose work helped to define Romanticism in the visual arts.

Delacroix’s “Portrait of Charles de Verninac” (circa 1826), acquired by purchase from an anonymous American collector with resources from the Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Income Fund, depicts with great liveliness the artist’s nephew, less than five years his junior. They had been close companions since childhood and corresponded frequently as their adult lives separated them.

The Royal Academy is to present the first blockbuster of the year, and expectations are high for this exhibition of Flemish baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens – an artist who painted everything from family portraits to ceilings including at Banqueting House in Whitehall. But the artist is known for his feast of color, violence, eroticism and history that entranced the rulers who paid him to decorate palaces across early 17th-century Europe, and not least his sensuously fleshy female nudes and the term they spawned: "Rubenesque."

The artist was also a scholar, a self-made gentleman and noted diplomat who used his connections with royal patrons to broker deals on behalf of European powers. From the French Romantic painter Delacroix, whose works owe Rubens everything, to Picasso, who claimed to dislike Rubens but was obviously influenced by him, this exhibition promises to be a truly stupendous celebration of a the artist's onfluence; the exhibition will look at how Rubens has inspired of great artists during his lifetime and over the proceeding centuries.

The Dallas Museum of Art acquired in May Frederiksborg Castle by Moonlight, 1817, by Danish artist Johan Christian Dahl (1788 – 1857). The recent acquisition is one of the most important works from the Copenhagen phase of Johan Christian Dahl’s career. Long missing, the work was rediscovered in 2000 after a cleaning revealed a signature and date of 1817, the year before Dahl left Copenhagen for Dresden. Dahl is best known today as a Romantic painter of Nordic landscapes, often seen in dramatic lighting or weather conditions. He is also considered one of the great masters of Danish Golden Age painting. Frederiksborg Castle by Moonlight, on view for the first time publicly since 1817, is currently accessible through the Museum’s conservation gallery.

The first record of Frederiksborg Castle by Moonlight appears in a letter from Dahl to fellow artist Christian Albrecht Jensen on October 30, 1817, in which he mentions several works he had completed that summer, including three paintings of Frederiksborg Castle. The largest of those three paintings, which is now in the DMA collection, was commissioned by Etatsraad Bugge. The other two works were created for King Frederik VI in 1817 and are now in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) in Copenhagen. One of the paintings for King Frederik shows the castle from the same vantage point in the palace gardens as the DMA painting, but in the daylight. The other shows the castle by moonlight but from a more distant point in the gardens.

On February 22, “Delacroix and the Matter of Finish,” the first exhibition in the U.S. to focus on the French Romantic artist in over a decade, opened at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. The exhibition, which features works from 27 international institutions including the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, the Musée national Eugène Delacroix in Paris and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, was previously on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California and was organized by the institution’s assistant director and chief curator, Eik Kahng.

The show presents 25 paintings and 20 works on paper, including a previously unpublished version of Delacroix’s “The Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius,” which Kahng authenticated after several years of scholarly and technical study. Jeannine O’Grody, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art, said, “We are thrilled to be one of only two venues for this show, which represents works of collections from around the world including Paris, Zurich, Madrid, and Toronto.”

Delacroix is often referred to as the father of French Romanticism, the movement that dominated French painting in the first half of the 19th century. However, the exhibition explores the artist’s relationship to Neoclassicism, Romanticism’s alleged antithesis, due to the artist’s allegiance to classical subjects and his admiration for the art of the past. The exhibition also suggests that Delacroix, with his fiery palette and loose brushwork, was something of a forefather to Impressionism.

“Delacroix and the Matter of Finish” will remain on view at the Birmingham Museum of Art through May 18, 2014.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art presents Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, the first exhibition in the U.S. to focus on the French Romantic artist in over a decade. The show includes 27 paintings and 18 works on paper as well as a previously unknown and unpublished version of Eugène Delacroix’s masterpiece, The Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, which surfaced in a Santa Barbara private collection. After several years of scholarly and technical study, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Assistant Director and Chief Curator, Eik Kahng, authenticated the painting.  

Delacroix is often referred to as the father of French Romanticism, the movement that dominated French painting in the first half of the 19^th century. However, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue by Kahng explore Delacroix’s relationship to Neoclassicism, Romanticism’s alleged antithesis, due to the artist’s allegiance to classical subjects and his admiration for the art of the past. The exhibition also suggests that Delacroix, with his fiery palette and loose brushwork, was something of a forefather to Impressionism.

Delacroix and the Matter of Finish features works from 27 international institutions including the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Musée national Eugène Delacroix in Paris and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. After it closes at the Santa Barbara Museum on April 20, 2014, the exhibition will travel to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama.

On October 27, 2013, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will present Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, the first exhibition in the U.S. to focus on the French Romantic artist in over a decade. The show will include 27 paintings and 18 works on paper as well as a previously unknown and unpublished version of Eugène Delacroix’s masterpiece, The Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, which surfaced in a Santa Barbara private collection. After several years of scholarly and technical study, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Assistant Director and Chief Curator, Eik Kahng, authenticated the painting.  

Delacroix is often referred to as the father of French Romanticism, the movement that dominated French painting in the first half of the 19^th century. However, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue by Kahng explore Delacroix’s relationship to Neoclassicism, Romanticism’s alleged antithesis, due to the artist’s allegiance to classical subjects and his admiration for the art of the past. The exhibition also suggests that Delacroix, with his fiery palette and loose brushwork, was something of a forefather to Impressionism.

Delacroix and the Matter of Finish features works from 27 international institutions including the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Musée national Eugène Delacroix in Paris and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. After it closes at the Santa Barbara Museum on April 20, 2014, the exhibition will travel to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama.

The Fenimore Museum of Art in Cooperstown, NY is currently hosting the exhibition Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision. The show presents a number of important works by key figures in the movement including Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), Thomas Cole (1801-1848), Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), Jasper F. Cropsey (1823-1900) and Asher Durand (1796-1886). Nature and the American Vision was organized by the New-York Historical Society and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts.

The exhibition aims to communicate the Hudson River School artists’ fascination with the American landscape. The mid-19^th century movement was influenced by romanticism and is defined by its paintings that celebrate nature’s sublimity and exude an almost ethereal quality. Many Hudson River School painters regarded nature as an indefinable manifestation of God, which strongly influenced the movement’s aesthetic qualities.

Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision will be on view at the Fenimore Museum of Art through September 29, 2013. The Fenimore, which is operated by the New York State Historical Association, specializes in American Folk Art, Indian art and artifacts, 19^th century genre painting and American photography.