International Art News

John Singer Sargent, At Torre Galli: Ladies in a Garden, 1910, oil on canvas; 71.1 x 91.4 cm; Lent by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 03/1388

From March 3 to July 15, 2012 – Palazzo Strozzi
In 2012, exactly 500 years since the death of Amerigo Vespucci, Florence will be marking this event with an exhibition designed to celebrate the strong ties linking the Old World and the New, and the cosmopolitan ambiance that bound the city to the New World for ever, transmitting European culture and sophistication to America.
The exhibition explores the American impressionists’ relationship with Italy, and with Florence in particular, in the decades spanning the close of the 19th and dawn of the 20th centuries. There was a marked upswing in the number of American artists travelling to Europe after the Civil War ended in 1865, and the trend continued on into the early 20th century. Hundreds of painters came to Paris and other parts of France while others studied in Germany, with England, Holland and Spain being other favourite locations. Italy, however, was an inescapable pole of attraction for most of them. Florence, Venice and Rome had been at the heart of the Grand tour for centuries and had become legendary for all those eager to study the art of the past, quite apart from their appeal in terms of the climate, the countryside, the people, and the overall atmosphere prevailing in them.
For the first time since recent exhibitions in France and England explored these American artists’ relationship with those two countries, this exhibition will be hosting the work of American painters who embraced the artistic vocabulary of Impressionism and spent time in Italy.
The exhibition will contain works by painters who, while not explicitly subscribing to the new style, were nevertheless crucial masters for the younger generations: men such as Winslow Homer, William Morris Hunt, John La Farge and Thomas Eakins.

Frank Duveneck, Villa Castellani, 1887, oil on canvas; 63.4 x 76.2 cm; New York (NY), Brooklyn Museum, Healy Purchase Fund B, 78.176

These will be followed by the great forerunners, artists such as John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who could boast of strong cosmopolitan leanings.
The main part of the exhibition will comprise works by artists of remarkable quality who spent time in Florence and who deserve to be better known. Their number includes members of the American impressionist group known as the Ten American Painters: William Merrit Chase, John Henry Twachman and Frederick Childe Hassam. Franck Duveneck also played an important role in fostering relations between American and local artists by putting together the “Duveneck boys“, a group that included his wife Elisabeth Boott and the painter Joseph Rodefer De Camp.

More at Palazzo Strozzi

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit 1882 John Singer Sargent Oil on canvas Gift of Mary Louisa Boit, Julia Overing Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit, and Florence D. Boit in memory of their father, Edward Darley Boit, 1919 19.124

November 20, 2010 – December 31, 2011 – Museum of Fine Arts
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), is opening the doors of its new wing for the Art of the Americas. The Art of the Americas Wing, as well as the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard, are the focal points of the MFA’s transformational expansion and renovation project, planned and designed by architects Foster + Partners (London). The Art of the Americas Wing allows for the display of more than 5,000 works from the Museum’s American collections, more than doubling the number previously on view.
The MFA’s wing expands the context for American art. For the first time since the Museum’s founding in 1870, magnificent works representing all of the Americas are presented together in a wide range of media, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, furniture, decorative arts, and musical instruments, as well as textiles, fashions, and jewelry. The Art of the Americas Wing contains 53 galleries—totaling 51,338 square feet—which include nine period rooms and four Behind the Scenes galleries. Galleries are arranged chronologically on four floors, allowing visitors to travel through time as they ascend. They begin on Level LG (Lower Ground), which is dedicated to ancient American, Native American, 17th-century andmaritime arts; Level 1 features 18th-century art of the colonial Americas and early 19th-century art; Level 2 examines 19th-century and early 20th-century art; and Level 3 focuses on 20th-century art. In the center of each level, large-scale core galleries form a central spine where iconic works of art highlight elements of each period. Complementary galleries run along each side as well as in adjacent north and south pavilions.

Museum Hours

En Route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish), 1878. Oil on canvas, 78.8 x 122.8 cm. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

10 July – 26 September 2010 – Royal Academy of Arts
This July the Royal Academy of Arts will present an exhibition of works by John Singer Sargent RA (1856-1925). Sargent is, of course, best known as a portraitist. Less familiar is his passion for the sea and the remarkable range of maritime works that he produced in the early years of his career. Over 80 paintings, drawings and watercolours produced during the young artist’s travels from Paris to the Normandy and Brittany coasts, the Italian island of Capri, Morocco and to various Mediterranean ports will form the subject of this revelatory exhibition.

The exhibition will focus on the formative years of Sargent’s artistic career covering the period of 1874-1880. During these years Sargent travelled extensively and the dramatic close-up views of the Atlantic Ocean painted from the deck during two transatlantic voyages reveal Sargent’s admiration for Turner and Courbet and show flashes of the bravura painting that would
distinguish his mature career. A little-known scrapbook reveals Sargent’s precocious talent as a draughtsman and shows how well he understood the mechanism of boats.

Sargent and the Sea will feature Setting Out to Fish, a major exhibition piece which was displayed at the Paris Salon in 1878. For this imposing painting of fisher folk in the Breton fishing port of Cancale, Sargent made a number of striking plein-air oil studies which will be presented with the painting. The following year Sargent was captivated by the blue sea of Capri where
children playing on the beach inspired some tender and evocative compositions. The busy Mediterranean port scenes add another dimension to Sargent’s maritime oeuvre. To complement the exhibition there will be a selection of the dazzling boating watercolours that Sargent painted in Venice in the early twentieth century.

Museum Hours