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Indepth Arts News:
"Ingres to Matisse: Masterpieces of French Painting"
2001-06-30 until 2001-09-23
Royal Academy of Arts
London, ,
UK
50 French masterpieces are presented in Ingres to Matisse, which will provide a unique opportunity for
visitors to enjoy magnificent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings rarely seen outside the
United States. The exhibition will include over thirty artists from Ingres and Delacroix to Monet, Renoir,
Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse. Ingres to Matisse is drawn from the outstanding art
collections of two Baltimore institutions, the Walters Art Museum and The Baltimore Museum of Art, and
this will be the only opportunity in Europe to see the exhibition, currently on a five-venue tour of the
United States.
Opening with work by Ingres and Delacroix and closing with the paintings of Picasso and Matisse, the
exhibition will provide a broad overview of French painting from the early nineteenth-century to the
1930s. Ingres to Matisse will explore how Delacroixs 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 colour influenced the great founding figures of the modern movement, Cézanne,
Gauguin and Van Gogh. The exhibition will show how these artists laid the foundations for the
individual, innovative approaches of Picasso and Matisse. Works to be shown include Ingress Oedipus
and the Sphinx (1864), Degass Before the Race (1882-4), Van Goghs Landscape with Figures (1889)
and Matisses Large Reclining Nude (1935).
The Walters Art Museum and The Baltimore Museum of Art benefited respectively from the remarkable
legacies of four renowned collectors - William and Henry Walters and Etta and Claribel Cone - who
together with other Baltimore residents established the city as a major centre for French Art. The
Baltimore Museum of Arts famous Cone Collection, assembled by the sisters Claribel and Etta Cone,
includes works by Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso, as well as one of the most comprehensive collections
of Matisse outside France. The Walters Art Museum, formed from the huge collection of William Walters
and his son Henry, includes a splendid selection of European art from the Medieval period to the end of
the nineteenth-century, as well as a highly significant collection of Asian art.
ORGANISATION
This touring exhibition has been organised and circulated by the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore
Museum of Art and has been curated by William Johnston, Associate Director, Walters Art Museum and
Sona Johnston, Curator of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art. At the Royal Academy of Arts, the exhibition
has been curated by MaryAnne Stevens, Collections Secretary and Senior Curator.
CATALOGUE
The exhibition is accompanied by a handsome catalogue, which includes an introductory essay on the
history of collecting in Baltimore and biographies for each of the artists. Each painting is reproduced in
full colour and accompanied by an explanatory text.
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