Drawing on new scholarship, this exhibition of some 100 oil sketches made outdoors across Europe during the late 18th and early 19th centuries includes several recently discovered works and explores the variety of inventive ways in which enraptured artists recorded their moments in nature.

Mesmerizing and unsettling, the immersive video Incoming (2014–2017) by Richard Mosse (b. 1980) presents viewers with the sights and sounds of a pressing issue of our time: mass migration. Seeking a new way to shed light on the refugee crisis and “the urgent narratives of human displacement,” Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten capture fragments of events along two major pathways leading into Europe—one from Africa, the other from the Middle East—using a highly specialized surveillance camera. Originally designed for military use, the camera produces images by detecting thermal radiation, including the heat of a human body, from as far as 18 miles away. The effect allows Mosse to walk a tightrope, exposing the intimate stories of these refugees while providing a veil of privacy, isolating the plight of individuals while underscoring their interconnectedness with all humanity.

This is the first major exhibition held outside Spain to celebrate the art of the most important sculptor active on the Iberian Peninsula during the first half of the 16th century. Berruguete was a revolutionary force in the arts, famed for creating sculptures in painted wood that convey astonishing depths of emotion through their dramatic poses, gestures, and facial expressions. The exhibition presents more than 40 works from across his varied career, including an early painting from his time in Italy as well as a selection of his drawings. The primary focus is on his sculptures, however. A large group of his finest have been lent by the Museo Nacional de Escultura in Valladolid. Some are used at the Gallery to recreate a section of one of his elaborate, multi-tiered altarpieces, known as retablos in Spanish.

Featuring 64 exquisite examples drawn entirely from the permanent collection, The Touch of Color: Pastels at the National Gallery of Art traces the history of pastel from the Renaissance to the 21st century and examines the many techniques that artists have developed to work with this colorful medium. Included are drawings by eighteenth-century virtuosos such as Rosalba Carriera and Jean-Étienne Liotard; innovative works by Edgar Degas, James McNeill Whistler, and others whose experiments and technical skills revived interest in the medium in the nineteenth century; and rare examples by artists who only took up pastels on occasion, among them Henri Matisse and Roy Lichtenstein. Because pastel is such a fragile medium, these works have seldom, if ever, been exhibited.

Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence is the first-ever monographic exhibition in the United States on Andrea del Verrocchio (c. 1435–1488), the innovative artist, painter, sculptor, and teacher whose pupils included Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, and likely Sandro Botticelli as well. The exhibition examines the wealth and breadth of Verrocchio's extraordinary artistry by bringing together some 50 of his masterpieces in painting, sculpture, and drawing that allow viewers to appreciate how his work in each art form stimulated creativity in the others. Groundbreaking technical research explores Verrocchio's materials and techniques, offering revelations about his artistic choices. Several carefully argued new attributions in different media are proposed in the exhibition. The National Gallery of Art is the sole American venue for the exhibition. A fully illustrated catalog will accompany the landmark exhibition.

On the 180th anniversary of photography’s introduction to the world in 1839, an exhibition of some 140 photographs offers an in-depth look at the development of the medium throughout its first 50 years. The Eye of the Sun draws from the Gallery’s rich holdings of 19th-century photographs and features many works which have not been on view previously, including several photographs recently acquired from Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro.

The painter Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) and the photographer Nathan Lerner (1913–1997) worked in different cities and probably never met. Yet they were united by the influence of surrealism, an artistic movement that started in France in the 1920s and sought to channel the powers of the unconscious mind into art.

The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Photography played a significant role both in preparing for the mission and in shaping the cultural consciousness of the event. An exhibition of some 50 works will include a selection of photographs from the unmanned Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter missions that led up to Apollo 11. The landmark event will be represented by glass stereographs, taken on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, showing close-up views of three-inch-square areas of the lunar surface, as well as iconic NASA and press photographs of the astronauts that were disseminated widely in the wake of the mission's success.

This exhibition presents technical manuals and festival books drawn from the Special Collections of the National Gallery of Art Library, which describe and depict an array of techniques and strategies. Representing many different times and places, they show how the technology and artistry of fireworks displays and the methods for recording them evolved in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, as rulers projected their power and prestige through pyrotechnic delights.

As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media—sculpture, painting, lacquerwork, ceramics, metalwork, textile, and the woodblock print.