International Art News

Attributed to the workshop of Pasquier Grenier, Siege of Asilah, (detail) 1475-1500, wool and silk, 428 x 1078 cm (168 1/2 x 424 7/16 in.), Collegiate Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana (Guadalajara). ©Fundación Carlos de Amberes. Photographs by Paul M.R. Maeyaert.

From September 18, 2011 to January 8, 2012 – The National Gallery of Art
The Pastrana Tapestries—among the finest surviving Gothic tapestries—will be on view together for the first time in the United States at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, from September 18, 2011, through January 8, 2012. The Invention of Glory: Afonso V and the Pastrana Tapestries will feature the recently restored set of four monumental tapestries that commemorate the conquest of two strategically located cities in Morocco by the king of Portugal, Afonso V (1432–1481).
Since the 17th century the tapestries have been the property of the Collegiate Church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Pastrana, Spain, just 50 miles east of Madrid. Because of their outstanding quality and historical significance, the Spanish government listed them as cultural patrimony to be safeguarded during the Spanish Civil War. Only one of the four tapestries has traveled previously to the U.S.; The Conquest of Tangier was included in the landmark National Gallery exhibition Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration in 1991–1992.
Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Fundación Carlos de Amberes, Madrid, in association with the Embassy of Spain, the Spain-USA Foundation, and the Embassy of Portugal and with the cooperation of the Embassy of Belgium and the Embassy of Morocco in Washington, DC, as well as the Diocese of Sigüenza-Guadalajara and Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Pastrana, Spain.

Gallery Hours

Gabriel Metsu A Man Writing a Letter, c. 1664–1666 oil on panel unframed: 52 x 40.5 cm (20 1/2 x 15 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Sir Alfred and Lady Beit Gift, 1987 (Beit Collection), x.39446 © National Gallery of Ireland, Photographer: Roy Hewson

April 10 to July 24, 2011 – National Gallery of Art, Washington
Featuring some 35 paintings, this exhibition will be the first monographic show of Metsu’s work ever mounted in the United States.

The son of the Flemish painter Jacques Metsue, Gabriel Metsu was born in Leiden in 1629. In 1644, at the age of fifteen, Metsu is recorded as one of a group of artists who were lobbying for the establishment of a Leiden Guild of St. Luke, and in 1648 he became a founder-member of the organization. With the exception of short absences in the early 1650s, he spent the next decade in Leiden. By July 1657, however, he had moved to Amsterdam. On April 12, 1658 he married Isabella de Wolff, a relative of the Haarlem classicist painter Pieter de Grebber (c. 1600-1652/1653). In January of the next year, Metsu became a citizen of Amsterdam, where he died in 1667 at the age of only thirty-eight.

It has been assumed that in addition to the early artistic training he would have received from his father, Metsu also must have studied with Gerard Dou, who was Leiden’s leading genre painter during the 1640s. This assumption may well be correct, but is not without problems, given that early works from Metsu’s Leiden period tend to be executed in a fairly broad and fluid manner far removed from the meticulously crafted, small-scale paintings of Dou and the other Leiden fijnschilders. With the possible exception of the local painter Jan Steen, Metsu, in fact, seems to have been influenced more by the Utrecht artists Jan Baptist Weenix (1621-c. 1660) and Nicolaus Knüpfer (c. 1603-1655). Interestingly, after moving to Amsterdam, Metsu’s style demonstrates more of the high level of detail and finish associated with the Leiden school.

The influence of several other artists–notably Johannes Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch, and Pieter de Hooch–is sometimes very evident in Metsu’s work, but despite the existence of a sizeable number of dated paintings, these influences occur without any clear chronological pattern, and it is difficult to establish a structure for Metsu’s stylistic development.

Metsu’s most widely acclaimed paintings are the genre pictures, generally depicting a small number of relatively large figures within an upright composition. In addition to his indoor genre scenes Metsu painted a handful of depictions of outdoor markets, a number of religious subjects and portraits, and a few still lifes. His only known pupil was the genre and portrait painter Michiel van Musscher (1645-1705).

Museum Hours

Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), River View (detail), oil on canvas, Washington, National Gallery of Art, Kress Collection © National Gallery of Art, Washington

9 March 2011 to 6 June 2011 – Grand Palais, Galeries nationales
More than eighty paintings and some thirty drawings from the Louvre and the Prado as well as many public and private collections present the most striking aspects of the history of landscape painting in the first half of the 17th century. The highlights are the diffusion of the works of Annibale Carracci; the assertion of Northern European naturalism; the development of neo-Venetian landscapes from the 1620s; the increasing number of painted views in genre scenes; the success of topographic landscapes and architectural caprices; and the extraordinary rendering of light and atmospheric effects.

Landscape painting started in earnest in Rome in the first half of the seventeenth century. Before then, nature was not an independent genre in European painting and the capital of Christianity witnessed the birth and development of this new pictorial category which became immensely popular. Since antiquity, artists had gone to Rome to complete their training but at the end of the sixteenth century various factors combined to foster a new profane genre: the simultaneous presence of sometimes highly specialised artists from many different centres, especially Flanders; the attraction of the eternal city, reinvigorated by the recent transformation of its urban landscape; a growing taste for drawing from the motif and the use of these sketches in studio painting; the impact of printmaking on the circulation of images and an upsurge in art theories; the existence of large collections of works by the Renaissance masters; and the huge commercial success of landscape paintings among art lovers, especially in aristocratic and pontifical families.

A number of the greatest seventeenth-century artists contributed to the emergence of landscape painting, including Annibale Carracci, Adam Elsheimer, Pieter Paul Rubens, Paul Bril, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Gaspard Dughet. The exhibition seeks to show some of their most accomplished works, illustrating their share in the development of various types of representation of nature, from ideal views of the Roman countryside to seascapes, through architectural caprices and nostalgic antique scenes in which myths alternate with history.

By the mid seventeenth century, the new pictorial genre was no longer a minor art; its prestige for the aristocratic collections is shown by the huge paintings commissioned for Buen Retiro palace in Madrid. The most experienced artists participated in cycles of paintings in the European courts which were a source of inspiration for artists all over Europe for several centuries. Landscape became a category in its own right and henceforth an integral part of art history.

The exhibition is divided into five sections:
I – Annibale Carracci, Paul Bril and Adam Elsheimer in Rome
II – Changes in Bolognese landscapes: the presence of classical culture
III – Changes in Northern landscapes: the diversification of Flemish culture and types of landscape
IV – The early years of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin
V – The great landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin

About twenty of the most significant drawings that the artists made in Rome are displayed halfway through the exhibition. Sometimes drawn in the open air but recomposed in the studio, they illustrate the growing importance of such studies in the genesis of landscape painting.

Museum Hours

Julia Margaret Cameron The Sunflower, 1866-1870 Paul Mellon Fund

Until the 3oth of January 2011- National Gallery of Art, Washington
In the first survey of British art photography focusing on the 1850s and 1860s, some 100 photographs and 20 paintings and watercolors chronicle the roles photography and Pre-Raphaelite art played in changing concepts of vision and truth in representation. Photography’s ability to quickly translate the material world into an image challenged painters to find alternate versions of realism. Photographers, in turn, looked to Pre-Raphaelite subject matter and visual strategies in order to legitimize photography’s status as a fine art. As the exhibition will show, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Henry Peach Robinson, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and many lesser known photographers had much in common with such painters as John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John William Inchbold, as all wrestled with the question of how to observe and represent the natural world and the human face and figure. This rich dialogue between photography and painting is examined in the exhibition’s thematic sections on landscape, portraiture, literary and historical narratives, and modern-life subjects.

Museum Hours