NEW HAVEN, CT.- To mark the launch of the Center’s online catalogue, Connections is a companion exhibition that replicates the experience of searching across the Center’s extraordinary collections. With more than two hundred paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, rare books, and manuscripts from the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, Connections presents both familiar works as well as some surprises. Alongside popular highlights from the collection such as Rubens’s bravura oil sketch Peace Embracing Plenty will be hitherto unexhibited works, including outstanding prints and drawings by Thomas Gainsborough. Taken together the exhibition reveals the depth and breadth of material available in the Center’s physical collections, which will now be available together in a single, searchable, online catalogue.

Among the themes explored in the exhibition are British Art in the 1630s; Hogarth and History; Sporting Art; The Academy and the Body; Egypt; British Modernism in the 1930s; and the art of Paul Sandby, George Stubbs, Thomas Gainsborough, and Samuel Palmer. The bay devoted to George Stubbs (1724–1806), for instance, showcases Stubbs’s extraordinary artistic range and some of the Center’s great treasures: paintings on canvas, copper, and earthenware; Wedgwood plaques and enamels; a selection of his technically innovative prints and drawings; the anatomical studies; and books and manuscripts of midwifery and anatomy.

The exhibition has been organized by Matthew Hargraves, Associate Curator and Head of Collections Information and Access, and Imogen Hart, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions and Publications, Yale Center for British Art.