JANUARY 23–March 27, 2011
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
A well-conceived and well-executed portrait can reach across the centuries and provide us with a direct human connection with the past. No matter how remote in time or place, or how famous or little-known the sitters or artists might be, portraits retain the power to enthrall.
Among the themes of western art, portraiture is perhaps the most engaging.
The thirty paintings and one sculpture exhibited here trace the various modes of European portraiture from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. The exhibition includes a range of portrait types, from informal head studies to idealized representations of historical figures, from official paintings intended for public display to private images of family members and friends. This variety demonstrates the range of functions a portrait might embrace: capturing a likeness for posterity, evoking character, memorializing a public persona, conjuring a historical figure, or standing in for an absent loved one. In each case, a portrait's special magic derives from the fact that it brings us eye to eye with a beautiful, mysterious, or fascinating face from long ago.
This exhibition was organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. All of the portraits are on loan from a private collection.
Eye to Eye: European Portraits 1450–1850
Richard Rand and Kathleen Morris
With an essay by David Ekserdjian
For centuries, portraiture has captured the imagination of both artists and viewers, not to mention the sitters themselves. A great portrait’s power to enthrall remains strong today, as is evident in the extraordinary group of masterworks recently assembled by a private collector and presented to the public for the first time.
Eye to Eye features thirty paintings by master artists from the late fifteenth through the early nineteenth century, including portraits by Hans Memling, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Anthony Van Dyck, Jean Baptiste Greuze, Jacques-Louis David, and other outstanding if sometimes lesser-known painters. The book brings to light a number of works that are virtually unknown, having never been published or publicly exhibited, including Portrait of a Man by the brilliant Mannerist artist Parmigianino; a remarkably fresh portrait of a young man by the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens; two canvases by the great Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera; and the glamorous and arresting Portrait of a Young Woman by Giovanni Battista Moroni, a sixteenth-century Italian painter famous for his penetrating depictions, and arguably one of the most talented portraitists of all time.
Published to accompany the Eye to Eye exhibition, this exquisite volume includes stunning color reproductions of each of the works as well as numerous full-page details. Informative texts by curators Richard Rand and Kathleen Morris, together with an insightful essay by the noted scholar David Ekserdjian, provide a fresh look at the range of styles, themes, and approaches in European portraiture.
Richard Rand is the Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Senior Curator and Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Kathleen Morris is the Sylvia and Leonard Marx Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Decorative Arts at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. David Ekserdjian is professor of art history in the Department of History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester and a Trustee of the National Gallery, London.
Published by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London
160 pages, 78 color illustrations
9 ½ x 11 inches
ISBN 978-0-300-17564-6
Published by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute