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The Center’s collection of approximately
1,900 paintings and 100 sculptures vividly narrates the story of British
art, life, and culture since the end of the Middle Ages. Particularly
strong in the period from the birth of William Hogarth (1697) to the
death of J. M. W. Turner (1851), the collection reflects the tastes
and interests of its founder, the late Paul Mellon.
Among the artists best represented are William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough,
Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, Joseph Wright of Derby, John Constable,
and J. M. W. Turner. The Center’s collection ranges from a late-fifteenth-century
Nottingham alabaster to paintings and sculpture by such twentieth-century
artists as Stanley Spencer, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and,
most recently, Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst.
The story of British art is by no means confined to artists born in
the British Isles. Major figures from continental Europe and America
painted for British patrons or spent periods of their careers in Britain.
Among those featured in the collection are Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony
van Dyck (both working at the Court of King Charles I), Canaletto
and Pompeo Batoni (both much patronized by British grand tourists),
Johann Zoffany, and the great Americans John Singleton Copley, Benjamin
West, and James McNeill Whistler.
While the Center’s large collection of British portraits contains
grand full-lengths by Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Thomas
Lawrence, the real character of this collection comes from portraits
of a less imposing type, known as “conversation pieces.”
These delightful, small-scale family groups achieved great popularity
during the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century, and
partly reflect the upsurge both in more intimate, small-scale domestic
interiors, and a great broadening of the market for pictures. Artists
like Hogarth, Gainsborough, Zoffany, and Arthur Devis were among the
best practitioners of this genre, and the Center’s collection
of conversation pieces by these artists is world-renowned.
Equally stunning is the Center’s rich array of British landscape
paintings. From meticulously drafted bird’s-eye views of country
estates in the period of the Restoration (1660), through spectacular
visions of the English countryside à la Claude, to
modern views of the Cornish coastline, the collection offers a provocative
account of the evolution in Britain of ideas, dreams, and debates
about town and country, agriculture, blood stock, rural labor, and
the natural world. Of particular note are works by the greatest British
landscape painters of the eighteenth century, Thomas Gainsborough
and Richard Wilson, and by their nineteenth-century counterparts,
John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. Visitors will savor Turner’s
Dort (or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam
Becalmed), and his elemental view of wind and spray against a
rocky coastline in the Hebrides, Staffa, Fingal's Cave;
Constable’s Hadleigh Castle, his full-scale sketch
for Stratford Mill, and a number of his famous cloud studies;
as well as a brilliant group of views in France and Italy by the great
Richard Parkes Bonington.
Thanks to the special interests of Mr. Mellon, the Center also has
one of the greatest collections of British sporting and animal paintings
in the world. It includes a number of pictures by the preeminent artist
of this genre, George Stubbs. Foxhunting, horseracing, and other equestrian
scenes by John Wootton, James Seymour, Sawrey Gilpin, James Ward,
Jean-Laurent Agasse, Benjamin Marshall, John Ferneley, and Alfred
Munnings are among the Center’s treasures.
Other genres represented prominently in the collection are marine
painting, especially the works of Samuel Scott and Charles Brooking;
the London cityscape, including a remarkable group of views on the
Thames by Canaletto; artists’ self-portraits (from Godfrey Kneller
to Vanessa Bell); the work of travel artists, with special emphasis
on India and Pakistan; and scenes from the plays of Shakespeare, together
with many portraits of eighteenth-century character actors, of which
the finest is surely Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Abington as
Miss Prue in Love for Love by William Congreve.
The Center’s growing collection of sculpture is especially strong
in works by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists such as Peter
Scheemakers, Louis-Francois Roubiliac, Joseph Nollekens, and Francis
Chantrey. The Center also holds spectacular examples of twentieth-century
sculpture, including works by Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore, Barbara
Hepworth, and distinguished contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst
and Rachel Whiteread.
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