Selections
from the Permanent Collection
19.11.2013 - 10.02.2014 Gallery 690
British and Scottish drawings on view include figure
and portrait studies by Thomas Gainsborough, Allan Ramsay, John Hamilton
Mortimer, David Allan, and George Richmond. Also on view is a group of
landscapes in graphite, ink, and watercolor by Gainsborough, Thomas Jones, and
Thomas Sandby; these works demonstrate an expanding artistic commitment from
the 1750s through the 1780s to sketching outdoors, as well as an increasingly
masterly and expressive use of watercolors. Many of these works are recent acquisitions.
A group of chalk drawings highlights the different
effects achieved with the medium by some of the great Flemish artists of the
seventeenth century, including Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob Jordaens. There is
also a selection of nineteenth-century French, German, British, and Russian
tree studies. In this group are drawings and a print by Paul Cézanne, Heinrich
Dreber, Edward J. Poynter, and >> Odilon Redon.
Other representations of nature can be found in a
selection of horse studies by artists ranging from the Florentine Andrea
del Verrocchio to Eugène Delacroix and Edgar Degas. Another section is devoted
to the flower bouquet. An independent genre from the late sixteenth century
onward, the bouquet has remained a constant subject of study and invention for
many artists in a vast array of media through the present day. The selection
includes early works by Joris Hoefnagel and Erasmus Hornick and follows the
genre into modern times with works by Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, and
American artists Robert Kipniss and Mary Frank.
Also on display is a group of sixteenth-century prints that demonstrates
the centrality of the Bible in Christian imagery and includes woodcuts by
Albrecht Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, Hans Burgkmair, and Lucas Cranach. In this
grouping are also a late fifteenth-century album with prints and a Limoges book
cover for a religious text. Another selection exhibits a delight in whimsical
and enigmatic subjects by exploring the works of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and
Francisco de Goya, both of whom explored artistic freedom and fantasy late into
the eighteenth century. (Text: Metropolitan Museum New York)