Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (Spanish, 1838–1874), The Choice of
a Model, 1868–74. Oil on wood. National Gallery of Art,
Washington. Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection), 2015.143.12.
Exhibitions
Fortuny: Friends and Followers
February 3–June 2, 2019
Recently the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, generously agreed to the long-term loan of an important painting by Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838–1874): The Choice of a Model (1868–74).
In honor of this prestigious loan, the Meadows Museum will host an exhibition dedicated to Fortuny and his world, drawing from its rich holdings of works on paper as well as key loans from private and public collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in order to showcase many of the friends, family, and followers who engaged with the popular Spanish painter’s work. Fortuny’s paintings were especially prized by nineteenth-century American collectors as well as by contemporaneous artists.
The legacy of that popularity resonates with the distinctly American provenance of both the Meadows’s Beach at Portici and the National Gallery’s The Choice of a Model, and their current ownership by American museums.
Lectures
The Spanish Look: Fortuny, Frenchmen, and the Sombrero Calañés
February 7, 2019
Daniel Ralston, Meadows Curatorial Fellow
This lecture explores how Fortuny, his artistic circle, and his principal American collectors sought to define, construct, and propagate their own unique image of Spain.
Symposium: Finding a Way: Art Exchanges Between Russia and the United States
Wednesday, February 13, 5:00–7:00 p.m.
This program will explore the politics of international cultural exchange since the 2011 moratorium on loans of art objects between Russian, government-owned museums and institutions in the United States. The program will begin with a conversation between art museum directors Mikhail Piotrovski of the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, and Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, followed by a discussion between diplomatic officials from Russia and the United States. Daniel T. Orlovsky, Professor and George Bouhe Research Fellow in Russian Studies, Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences, will moderate both conversations.
Eakins, Sargent, and Chase: Fortuny’s Divergent American Admirers
March 7, 2019
Brian Allen, independent art historian
This talk examines the Spanish master’s appeal to a range of young American painters working in differing styles, from Thomas Eakin’s realism, to John Singer Sargent’s painterly naturalism, and William Merritt Chase’s adaptation of brushwork akin to Impressionism.
Dressing the Model
April 11, 2019
Gloria Groom, chair of European painting and sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago
This lecture will explore why and how the artists of Mariano Fortuny’s circle—Tissot, Gérôme, Alfred Stevens, and other so-called academic painters—used fashion in their portraits and genre scenes, as well as how these artists intersected with the Impressionists, including Renoir, Monet, Degas, and Manet.
LUIS MARTÍN LECTURE SERIES IN THE HUMANITIES
Art in Medieval and Renaissance Spain
Six Fridays: March 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 & April 5, 10:30–11:30 a.m.
While the Meadows Museum is perhaps best known for its excellent collection of Early Modern and Modern Spanish art, it is also home to significant holdings of medieval and Renaissance painting and sculpture. Recent years have seen the significant addition of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century panel paintings to the collection, which help to offer a more balanced history of Spanish art. In order to contextualize these important acquisitions, this lecture series will consider artmaking in the Middle Ages beginning with the oldest object in the Meadows collection, which dates to the tenth century. The six-part lecture series will conclude with a look forward to the stylistic shifts characteristic of Renaissance art and architecture in the sixteenth century.
Exhibitions