MONTREAL.- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts recently unveiled 55 drawings spanning the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries from a Montreal private collection. As part of this exhibition, the MMFA is presenting some twenty other master drawings recently given to the Museum by the anonymous collector from artists including Delacroix, Greuze, Ingres and Romney.
As the successor to the 2013 exhibition, From the Hands of the Masters II: From Parmigianino to Matisse brings together works on paper by such remarkable artists as François Boucher, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Juan Gris, Katsushika Hokusai, Victor Hugo, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, Amadeo Modigliani, Gustave Moreau, Berthe Morisot, Parmigianino, Camille Pissarro, Giorgio Vasari, James McNeill Whistler, and Antoine Watteau.
The subjects range from studies for religious compositions to sensuous female nudes, from the Virgin to a ballerina, from male portraits to battling Japanese warriors. Also on display are a variety of landscapes, from a wintry sixteenth-century Northern European village scene to a lush tropical jungle in Venezuela, from the rocky coast of Guernsey to the fields of Normandy and an Impressionist vision of the countryside near Paris, and even the picturesque crossing of an arched bridge in nineteenth-century Japan. Still-lifes from the early period of Cubism also are presented, as is a black paper cut-out of an eagle by the renowned French author Victor Hugo.
“With unfailing accuracy, this Montreal collector, a great friend of the Museum, sizes up the landscape or a character at a glance, distinguishes posture from posturing. He chisels out the contours of reality incisively but with imagination, lucidly but with a drollness, in a style all his own. Quick to calculate in business, with friends he does not keep score. Always discreet to the point of anonymity, this man of action eschews ostentation. Contemporary artists and Old Masters scholars alike benefit from the goodwill of this loyal patron in all circumstances. An art lover, he acquires, exhibits and offers his prints and drawings—charcoals and sanguines, washes and watercolours—from the Renaissance to today. The depth and scope of his collection of works on paper, one of the finest in the land,” says Nathalie Bondil, Director General and Chief Curator of the MMFA.
“It is our joy to present to the public this selection of his collection and his benefactions. The purpose of this exhibition is to more fully suggest the breadth of taste and connoisseurship embodied in this great collection and the joy of collecting diverse objects that reflect the sensibilities of a single, discriminating collector,” added Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Senior Curator – Collections and Curator of Old Masters.
New acquisitions revealed
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is the repository of one of the most important graphic arts collections in Canada, encompassing prints, drawings and photographs that survey over five centuries of graphic achievement and include masterpieces by a broad diversity of artists spanning the history of European and North American art.
The exhibition is also featuring a selection of 20 drawings by François Boucher, Eugène Delacroix, Ciro Ferri, Charles de la Fosse, Théodore Géricault, Jacopo Palma il Giovane, Anne-Louis Girodet, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, le Guerchin, Charles-Nicolas Cochin le Jeune, Michel Corneille le Jeune, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jacob Jordaens, Carlo Maratti, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Domenico Piola, Sebastiano Ricci, George Romney, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and Orazio Samacchini, among the artworks given to the Museum by this Montreal collector. Many of them are being displayed for the first time at the Museum.
An exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The curator of the exhibition is Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Senior Curator – Collections and Curator of Old Masters, MMFA, under the direction of Nathalie Bondil, Director General and Chief Curator, MMFA.
