Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
November 14, 2021 – March 27, 2022
Pierre Auguste Renoir , Dance at Bougival, 1883, oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Picture Fund © Museum of Fine Arts Boston, All Rights Reserved
© Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
For the first time, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), is lending some 100 of the most significant paintings and works on paper from its renowned Impressionist collection for an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, its only American venue. Incomparable Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston traces the evolution of this 19th-century avant-garde movement, from its roots in the novel, naturalistic landscapes of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles Francois Daubigny, and other painters of the Barbizon School, to the early “optical color” experimentations in plein-air landscape painting by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro, to the frank depictions of modern urban life by Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition highlights the artists’ relationships and their thoughts, in their own words, to underscore the philosophy behind this now world-renowned movement.
“The MFA in Boston was the first museum in the U.S. to acquire a Degas, in 1903, and early patronage by pioneering Bostonian collectors ensured the growth of its now-extensive French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings,” commented Gary Tinterow, Director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, the MFAH. “This extraordinary collection has a distinctive capacity to narrate the history of French Impressionism with nuance, depth, and flare. We are enormously pleased to be able to share this rare selection here in Houston.”
The exhibition brings together the MFA’s 19th-century- and early-20th-century paintings, assembled in nine thematic groupings. An exhibition highlight is a breathtaking display of 15 canvases by Claude Monet, painted over a 30-year period, featuring Monet’s most beloved sites. Together, these paintings demonstrate the full scope of his immeasurable contribution to the Impressionist movement.
Additional works included are Claude Monet’s luminous Grainstack (Snow Effect), one of the artist’s famed series of 25 depictions of haystacks in varying seasons and light conditions, exhibited in May 1891 and purchased the following month by Bostonian Horatio Appleton Lamb; Edgar Degas’s empathic double portrait of his sister, Thérèse, and her husband, Edmondo Morbilli (about 1865), which remained with Degas, and then his descendants, until it was purchased by Boston collector Robert Treat Paine, 2nd; Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s life-size Dance at Bougival (1883), with its swirling evocation of modern café life; and Manet’s quintessentially urban portrait Street Singer (1862). (John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the patron who bequeathed this Manet to the MFA, Sarah Choate Sears, hangs in the American Paintings galleries of the MFAH.)
An integral aspect of the exhibition is a fascinating selection of works on paper showcasing the artists’ working processes. These prints, with concentrations of works by Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt, illuminate the artists’ working methods and approaches to their landscapes, portraits, and interiors, as part of a collaborative publication venture. Pissarro sought technical advice from Degas for his etching and aquatint of a favored woodland view. Edgar Degas’s painting Visit to a Museum (about 1879–90), from his series depicting women, including his friend and fellow Impressionist Mary Cassatt, in museum galleries, is accompanied by three prints from that series that portray Cassatt; four etching-and-aquatint prints from Cassatt’s own series In the Opera Box (about 1880) reveal the avid experimentation of her printmaking practice.
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It has been curated by Katie Hanson, Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, and Julia Welch, Assistant Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The presentation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is organized by Helga Aurisch, Curator, European Art.
MFAH - THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77005
Beck Building, Galleries 201–209
