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London's Royal Academy Hosts Masterpieces of French Painting
Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Degas -- the Royal Academy of Arts in London has wheeled out the big guns, providing a unique opportunity for visitors to enjoy 50 pieces of magnificent 19th and early 20th century paintings rarely seen outside the United States.
The exhibition, entitled "Ingres to Matisse" and opened to public on Saturday, contains every guaranteed crowd of pleasure of mostly impressionist and post impressionist French art, including Ingres's Oedipus and the Sphinx, Degas's Before the Race, Van Gogh 's Landscape with Figures, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude.
Ingres to Matisse explores how Delacroix's palette provided an essential model for Manet and the Impressionists, represented in the exhibition by Degas, Monet, Pissarro and Sisley, whose exploration of light and color influenced the great founding figures of the modern movement, Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. The exhibition shows how these artists laid foundations for the individual, innovative approaches of Picasso and Matisse.
The astonishing truth about the exhibition is that all the pictures come from two small museums in Baltimore, built to house stupendous private collections, based on fortunes made in whiskey and American railroads.
Although individual paintings have been loaned, the collections have never left Baltimore's Walters Art Gallery or the Museum of Art before.
The Royal Academy curator Mary Anne Stevens said that although other American cities, including New York and Boston, had major private collectors, she could think of no parallel for the frenzy for French art which gripped Baltimore in the late 19th century.
William Walters, a rye whiskey magnate who diversified into railroad construction, was the first of the great collectors. The gallery attached to his house - to which he admitted paying visitors from 1874 - was expanded by his son Henry, and he on his death in 1931 left the city 22,000 works of art.
Walters Gallery curator Bill Johnston said Baltimore's French connection was strengthened by a quirk of history. Napoleon's youngest son, Jerome, visited the city in 1803. He wed Elizabeth Patterson, daughter of a wealthy merchant. When Napoleon was crowned emperor he recalled his son and annulled the marriage, but by then there were two little Bonaparte-Pattersons.
The major collectors included George Lucas, an engineer who moved to Paris. He left Baltimore 300 paintings, 18,000 drawings and 140 bronzes. He introduced many visiting Baltimore collectors to the artists, including the Cone sisters, whose fortune came from cotton and textiles. Their collection included works by C zanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso, and 42 by Matisse.
They sometimes bought works, from artists they admired or had befriended, with reservations. When Etta Cone bought the boots by Van Gogh she wrote to her sister: "The pair of shoes will not grace my living room with beauty. However, it is a Van Gogh - almost certainly."
The tradition continues. Baltimore has several major collectors of contemporary art, some still buying old masters and impressionist works despite their soaring auction room prices.
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