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

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Raphael: The Woman With the Veil

Milwaukee Museum of Art

Subscribe to 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.

Raphael painted The Woman With the Veil as a response to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, said the Associated Press. “Once considered one of the most famous paintings in the world,” it rarely leaves the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy, and its current short tour—it hung briefly in Nevada and in Portland, Ore., before making this stop in Milwaukee—will be “its last United States appearance, likely for many years.” The painting itself radiates a vision of shimmering perfection, said D.K. Row in the Portland Oregonian. “Raphael was not as cerebral or psychological as Leonardo,” concerned less with capturing emotion than with producing the image of an ideal. The woman wears a “sumptuous silk dress and veil that seems to encase, but not engulf, her.” She holds her right hand to her chest, drawing attention to her precious necklace, while a matching bracelet hangs from her left arm. “It isn’t clear who she is,” though some speculate that she might have been the artist’s lover. As with da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, “mystery is part of the attraction of Raphael’s unassuming gem.”

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 “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.

“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.