Assembled over a period of more than 140 years, the collection of The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Md., entails one of the finest holdings of Nineteenth Century paintings in the United States.
The only West Coast venue for the exhibition, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art will present “Delacroix to Monet: Masterpieces of Nineteenth Century Painting from The Walters Art Museum” January 30⁍ay 30.
The exhibition includes 40 works from this collection. Although strongly weighted in favor of French painting, this exhibition, like the collection, also includes major works by British, Spanish and American artists.
Each painting is satisfying on its own, but when displayed together, captures the historical breadth and depth of The Walters’ collection, which was formed by father William T. Walters (1819‱894) and son Henry (1848‱931).
Included are fine canvases representing all the major movements of Nineteenth Century French art, from Neoclassicism through Impressionism. For example, Ingres and Delacroix, the leaders of the opposing schools of Neoclassicism and Romanticism, both derived inspiration from the past, but Ingres †the neoclassicist †looked to Greek and Roman antiquity and the High Renaissance in Italy, whereas Delacroix †the romanticist †turned to the Middle Ages and more recent history.
In this, Ingres’s perfected, late version of “Oedipus and the Sphinx,” 1864, the aging artist reinterprets a subject he had first treated in his early maturity: the mythological creature of ancient Thebes grimaces in horror as Oedipus solves her riddle causing the Sphinx to hurl herself onto the rocks below, which are strewn with the bones of her earlier victims. The artist took up this episode from the ancient Greek tale at the beginning of his career and returned to it again several times, including this late version, which has the added poignancy as a personalized allegory of the aging painter’s melancholic awareness of his own mortality.
Another highlight is The Walters’ “Christ on the Sea of Galilee,” 1854, by Delacroix, which seems to literally rock with the powerful motion of the raging sea.
Among the leaders of so-called Barbizon School painters who anticipated the Impressionist compulsion to paint directly “from the motif” outdoors in nature is Jean-François Millet. The exhibition includes “The Potato Harvest,” 1855, one of the artist’s most moving depictions of the unidealized, rustic simplicity and hardship of the peasants living nearby the village of Barbizon, where the artist moved in 1851.
Also on view is one of The Walters’ most beloved works of art, “Springtime,” circa 1872, by Claude Monet. During the early 1870s, Monet frequently depicted his wife, Camille, and their son, Jean, in the backyard garden. In “Springtime,” Monet was interested less in capturing a likeness than in studying how unblended dabs of color could suggest the effect of brilliant sunlight filtered through leaves.
Another gem on view is “Before the Race” (1882‱884) by Edgar Degas, a colleague of Monet’s whose artistic approach, while also rooted in direct observation, is threaded with numerous references to the art of the past, however disguised by the master’s unorthodox technique and mobilization of newer technology.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is at 1130 State Street. For information, 805-963-4364 or www.sbma.net .
