The Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee will open Saturday, February 2 with exhibitions from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts consisting of 19th and early 20th century French art by masters such as Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau and Vincent van Gogh and sporting art genre from the 18th through the 20th century as well as works by Sir Francis Grant, John Frederick Herring, Benjamin Marshall, George Morland and George Stubbs that features depictions of horse racing, hunting, fishing and farming. This exhibition will run through May 5, 2019.
Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, and Their Times: The Mellon Collection of French Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
With its core of Impressionist paintings of more, the collection also comprises masterpieces from every important school of French art, from Romanticism to Cubism. These works represent more than 150 years of French art and exemplify the Mellons’ personal vision and highly original strategies, which provide a context for understanding this unique collection of French art.
“In addition to acquiring canonical works by modern masters, the Mellons had an eye for their more intimate creations,” says Frist Art Museum chief curator Mark Scala. “Mr. Mellon wrote, ‘My own feeling is that size has nothing to do with the quality and importance of a work of art, just as a preliminary drawing or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and an emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.’”
About
A graduate both of Yale College and the University of Cambridge in England, Paul Mellon was the son of industrialist, banker and politician Andrew Mellon, himself a distinguished art collector and benefactor who was instrumental in the creation of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1937.
Over the years, Paul Mellon donated more than a thousand works from his father’s collection and his own to the National Gallery.
Bunny Mellon was both an art aficionado and a devoted Francophile. After the Mellons married, they began to acquire French works from the 19th and 20th centuries. While many were given or bequeathed to the National Gallery, Paul Mellon donated selections from the French collection to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts where he was a longtime trustee, including major gifts of British and American art.
A Sporting Vision: The Paul Mellon Collection of British Sporting Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
This collection of more than 65 works proposes a fresh look at sporting art within wider social and artistic contexts, including the scientific and industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, the transformation of the British countryside, the treatment of horses and other animals, and society’s changing habits and customs.
The exhibition is organized thematically and introduces the genre through the career of George Stubbs, who is considered the greatest practitioner of British sporting art and renowned for the elegant naturalism of his animal portraits.
The section “In Pursuit” includes paintings of hunting, shooting and fishing by Sir Francis Grant, Benjamin Marshall, Sir Alfred Munnings and others that illustrate the evolution of the hunt and its social impact over almost two hundred years.
“In Motion” is dedicated to racing and carriage horses, including John Wootton’s monumental depictions of Arabian stallions.
“Animal, Man, Country” examines representations of human and animal relationships to each other and to their environment and includes works commissioned to record specialized breeding practices and natural history, such as George Garrard’s A Barbary Antelope and a Black Swan (1811).
The final section, “The World Upside Down,” shows humorous pratfalls occurring during outdoor pursuits that encourage a view of sport as free play, where anything can happen.
Paul Mellon developed an interest in British art that would continue throughout his life. He admired and often emulated the lifestyle and traditions of the landed gentry in England and had an abiding passion for fox hunting and training thoroughbreds. In 1966, he funded the establishment of the Yale Center for British Art, to which he gave a vast collection of artworks and rare books.