Once-in-a-lifetime shows: European treasures visit the U.S.

Raphael: The Woman With the Veil; Masterpieces of European Painting From Dulwich Picture Gallery; The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures From the Court of Burgundy; Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces From the Davies Collection

Raphael: The Woman With the Veil

Milwaukee Museum of Art

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Masterpieces of European Painting From Dulwich Picture Gallery

Frick Collection, New York

Through May 30

Here’s a show that proves “a small exhibition can be every bit as lively and often more rewarding than a blockbuster,” said Richard Dorment in the New York Review of Books website. The Dulwich gallery, an exquisite little museum in suburban London, has sent nine “major yet relatively little-known paintings” from its collection for a brief stay at New York’s Frick Collection. A tantalizing “amuse-bouche to encourage Americans to visit the historic collection,” these works by Rembrandt, Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, and others perfectly complement the Frick’s redoubtable permanent collection. For instance, the Frick has no paintings at all by the Spanish master Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, while the Dulwich has a remarkable one. The Flower Girl—Spring (c. 1665–70) shows a street girl painted “with the surface brilliance usually reserved for portraits of noblewomen.” In the case of Anthony van Dyck, the Frick has eight of his portraits but not one history painting; now, temporarily, the Dulwich’s magnificent Samson and Delilah (1619–20) fills the gap. Finally, the Frick has two full-length portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, but neither is “as fresh or as intimate” as the Dulwich’s double portrait, Elizabeth and Mary Linley—the Linley Sisters (1771–72). “Even if you think you know these artists well, go anyway: These pictures rarely travel,” and New York’s Upper East Side is a lot closer than London.

The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures From the Court of Burgundy

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Through May 23

The “curious procession of alabaster figures” that now stands in a gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has never before left Dijon, France, said John Zeaman in the Bergen County, N.J., Record. For six centuries, these 37 doll-size statuettes, collectively known as the “Mourners,” have adorned the tomb of John the Fearless, onetime Duke of Burgundy. Despite the figures’ diminutive dimensions—each is just 16 inches in height—their physical variety amazes. Two artists, Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier, labored for a quarter-century on them, inventing such a range of poses that this gathering of somber monks “almost brings to mind the fashion catwalk.” Some of the figures wear their dark cowls pulled down, obscuring their faces; others have them wound around their heads like turbans. “Some robes swag down from the right or left shoulders, others fall straight and puddle at the feet, others are pleated like columns.” With their hushed spirituality and technical sophistication, the Mourners open “an intimate window” on a culture poised between the mysticism of the Middle Ages and the realism of the Renaissance.

Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces From the Davies Collection

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Through April 25

“What did a pair of rebellious young heiresses do, a hundred years ago, in the days before TMZ and table dancing?” asked Kevin Conley in The Washington Post. If they were Welsh coal heiresses Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, they collected daring impressionist and naturalistic landscapes, “the occasional Romantic seascape,” and “a post-impressionist masterwork or two.” On loan from the Davies Collection in Wales, most of this exhibit’s 53 paintings by Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and their contemporaries have never crossed the Atlantic before. But many are among each artist’s most recognizable works. Several late “sunlit” Cézannes present Mont Sainte-Victoire, a peak in Provence. A Jean-François Millet canvas captures a lonely man in a windy countryside, while a Monet shows a “bird’s-eye view of London Bridge, almost unrecognizable under a pink fog.” Together, these works create an atmosphere of reflective contemplation—“with one stunning exception.” The gorgeously dressed actress in an 1874 Pierre-Auguste Renoir portrait comes across as “dainty and assertive and determined all at once.” One suspects that the painting’s onetime owners probably thought of themselves the same way.