News Release: August 1, 2000
Small Northern European Portraits from the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, on View at the National Gallery of Art September 17, 2000–February 19, 2001
Washington, DC–Largely selected from the collection of The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, this exhibition focuses on small-scale portraits made in northern Europe between the mid-fifteenth and late-seventeenth centuries. Small Northern European Portraits from The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, will be on view in the central room of the Dutch Cabinet Galleries in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art from 17 September 2000 through 19 February 2001.
Forty-three works--ranging from illuminated manuscripts and oil paintings to enamels, bronze figurines, medals, and prints--reveal the inherent intimacy of the small-portrait masterpiece. The exhibition illustrates the fascination that miniature portraiture held for some of the finest artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and underscores the renewed value these artists placed on the individual. In addition to the works from The Walters, the exhibition includes portraits from the National Gallery of Art's permanent collection and generous loans from other public and private collections.
"These endlessly fascinating portraits are surprisingly varied, not only in the materials used, but also in their purpose and function," said Earl A. Powell lll, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are pleased to present this exhibition in our distinctive Dutch Cabinet Galleries--an ideal setting for this rich collection of northern European portraiture."
The is organized into four broad themes, representing the most important aspects of small-scale portraiture from this period: devotional portraits, political portraits, English and French miniatures, and Dutch intimate portraits.
The major impetus for the development of portraiture in northern Europe in the fifteenth century was Christian piety. The exhibition includes a magnificent portrait miniature from a Book of Hours (a collection of prayers for the different times of the day). Painted in opaque watercolor with gold leaf, the image is a record of a woman's faith of she kneels in prayer before the Virgin. This work was painted about 1410 by one of the foremost manuscript illuminators in Paris at this time, the anonymous Franco-Flemish artist known today as Luçon Master.
Donor with Saint John the Baptist, a panel painting by Hugo van der Goes, was also conceived as a devotional image. It was painted in about 1475 in Ghent, at a time when portraiture began to reflect the new importance attached to the individual, a development fostered by the Renaissance revival of interest in Greek and Roman philosophy.
The revival of interest in Roman coins had a profound effect on the development of secular portraiture in sixteenth-century Germany, where artists produced portrait medals. First developed in Italy, portrait medals, like coins, are circular and usually bear a portrait on the front and a symbolic figure or inscription on the back. The influence of Roman imperial coins is evident in the strong features and clear profile in Emperor Charles V, Wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece (c. 1521), a gilt bronze medal probably by Hans Schwarz (the originator of the German Renaissance medal).
The exhibition also includes allegorical portrait bronze statuettes representing Henry IV, king of France, as Jupiter and Marie de Médicis as Juno; several exquisite seventeenth-century English miniatures (precious objects that were given to friends and loved ones); and seventeenth-century Dutch intimate portraits, including works by Cornelis van Poelenburgh and Jan de Bray.
Small Northern European Portraits from The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The curators of the exhibition are Joaneath Spicer, The James A. Murnaghan Curator of European Art at The Walters Art Gallery, and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of northern baroque paintings at the National Gallery of Art. A free brochure, made possible by Juliet and Lee Folger/The Folger Fund, is available at the entrance to the exhibition.
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