New Space for Old Masters
The museum's collection
of Old Master paintings has been growing in recent years, thanks
to purchases as well as generous gifts and extended loans. But
the space in which to display them hadn't kept pace-until now.
With the recent renovation and expansion, the new Renee Cary
Gallery is now home to rotating installations of European paintings
from the 17th through the 19th centuries. The exquisite Neoclassical
landscape by Pierre- Henri Valenciennes acquired in 2000, a
dramatic Vanitas Still-Life by Hendrick Andriessen, and Daniel
Seiter's Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene have taken up
residence in the beautiful new red-walled space alongside portraits
by the French artists Nicolas Largillière and Merry-
Joseph Blondel, the latter a winner of the 1803 Prix de Rome.
In addition, a group of ten major Italian, Flemish and Dutch paintings that have been on loan from a private British trust will be displayed with greater frequency than ever before. Among those extended loans are canvases by two of Holland's most highly respected painters: one, an Italianate landscape by Jan Both, and the other a winter scene by the artist and collector Jan van de Cappelle. Hanging together with the Jan Both will be a charming, jewellike painting of Diana and her nymphs in a landscape, executed by one of Both's students, Willem de Heusch, and purchased by the museum in 1981. Italian paintings on loan from the same trust include a dynamic largescale grisaille study for one of Luca Giordano's most important paintings, Perseus turning Phineas and his followers to stone; an Adoration of the Shepherds by 16th century Italian Bonifazio Veronese; and Corrado Giaquinto's Madonna and Child with Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena. Several of these works are of a scale that precluded their regular display in the past, when the museum's former main gallery also doubled as the space for special exhibitions. The new 3,400 square-foot addition provides dedicated galleries for temporary shows, allowing many more works of art from the permanent collection to be on view and available to students and the general public. Old Master paintings from the collection have frequently served the curriculum in various departments, ranging from art history and English to religion and Italian. During the spring semester of 2002, one course that will make particular use of the new installation will be John Varriano's advancedlevel seminar The Sacred and the Profane in Renaissance and Baroque Art. More Room for Modern The renovated
John and Norah Warbeke Gallery and the newly created T. Marc
Futter Gallery provide majestic space for displaying paintings
and sculpture from the second half of the 19th century to the
present. The installation showcases more than 40 objects from
the museum's permanent collection which have languished in storage
for much of the past three decades. The collection is especially
strong in the area of landscape painting. The earliest painting
in the gallery was created in the mid-1850s by Charles François
Daubigny, one of the original members of the Barbizon group
who attracted new attention to landscape as a subject for artists.
The Water's Edge, Optevoz demonstrates the artist's
sensitivity to the changing effects of light, textures, and
colors observed at a particular site, in this case a pond near
the French village of Optevoz.
The working method of American artist George Inness owes some debt to that of the Barbizon painters in that Inness, too, made close observations and oil sketches at the site he depicted in Saco Ford: Conway Meadows (1876). Three of these sketches record the features of Mount Holyoke's painting: dark clouds obscuring the summit of Moat Mountain and patches of sunlight highlighting the banks of the river in the middle distance. Albert Bierstadt used sketches as well as photographs as the basis for his depiction of Hetch Hetchy Canyon, which he visited on his second trip to California in 1875. Famous for making the already spectacular scenery of the American west even more sublime than it actually was, Bierstadt used effects of sunlight and mist to emphasize the dramatic scale of the mountain walls of the canyon. Twentieth-century landscapes are included in the installation as well, ranging from William Glackens' urban scene, Skaters, Central Park, to Arthur Wesley Dow's The Red Island, which brings landscape painting to the edge of abstraction. Lurid Sky, painted in 1929, is an important early surrealist work by Yves Tanguy, one of the few in which the sky plays a dominant role. The museum's collection is also rich in portraiture and figure painting. American artist Irving Wiles made exquisitely beautiful portraits of the wealthy and well-known, including the subject of Mount Holyoke's painting, Maria Safanoff, a distinguished pianist and daughter of a famous Russian composer. Annie Lavelle, exemplifies Robert Henri's preference for painting the children of working-class families. Milton Avery typically used members of his own family and friends as sitters. In Discussion, the artist's wife, Sally Avery, is on the left, conversing with family friend, art dealer Tirca Karlis, in an intimate setting. The painting, though, is as much about the relationship between the brilliant Matisse-like colors as it is about the relationship between the two sitters.
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