Displaying items by tag: letters

An important archive comprising Lucian Freud’s sketchbooks, drawings and letters has been acquired by the nation from the estate of Lucian Freud through the Acceptance in Lieu Scheme. The archive has been permanently allocated to the National Portrait Gallery, which in 2012 staged the acclaimed Lucian Freud Portraits exhibition, the Gallery’s most visited ticketed exhibition.

The National Portrait Gallery plans to make the archive, which has never been published or exhibited, accessible to the public.

Opening this summer at the New Orleans Museum of Art, A Louisiana Parlor: Antebellum Taste & Context is an exhibition featuring the Butler-Greenwood Plantation parlor furnishings acquired by the museum from descendants of the family in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The 1850s/60s parlor suite has survived with original textiles and rich documentation, making it one of the South’s best preserved examples of a pre-Civil War Louisiana interior.

The exhibition explores the relationship between this refined interior and its layered historical context through family portraits on loan from The Historic New Orleans Collection and through documents housed in the Mathews family archives of letters, receipts, and bills of sale held at LSU Library Special Collections.

In the spring of 1925, the famed painter John Singer Sargent was preparing to travel from London to Boston. His plan? To oversee the final installation of murals he’d created for the Museum of Fine Arts — mythic works that would join similar paintings at the Boston Public Library and Harvard’s Widener Library, cementing the artist’s relationship with the city he loved.

But Sargent never made the trip: He died in his sleep before embarking on the voyage.

About 52,000 photographs, letters, sketchbooks, and technical records offering insights into some of Britain’s greatest 20th-century artists are to be put online for the first time.

Tate Archive has announced details of the first tranche of material, which anyone, anywhere can access freely. It includes the love letters of painter Paul Nash, the detailed sculpture records of Barbara Hepworth, and 3,000 photographs by Nigel Henderson, providing a behind-the-scenes backstage look at London’s 1950s jazz scene.

The completely new presentation of the permanent collection of the Van Gogh Museum focuses on the development of Vincent van Gogh. The story of Van Gogh's life and art is the common theme of all floors of the museum; and his paintings, as well as his drawings and letters have now found a permanent place. All the myths surrounding Van Gogh – his suicide, illness and ear– will now be discussed in detail for the first time. More so than before, Van Gogh is presented in the context of his own time. His huge impact on generations after him will also be shown: the museum will demonstrate that Van Gogh has been a source of inspiration until this very day by presenting works on loan that will be regularly changed.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is one of the most famous artists of all times and he has become an icon, an almost mythical, larger than life figure. This underlying idea is the start through the spectacularly redesigned Van Gogh Museum.

The Reina Sofía will assume the technical direction, research management, preservation and dissemination of the archive for a period of ten years, with the option to fully acquire the collection down the road.

Between 1973 and 1996 Carter Burden, a former trustee of the Morgan Library & Museum and onetime New York City councilman, assembled the greatest collection of modern American literature in private hands. In doing so, Burden revolutionized the market in modern first editions by paying record prices for copies in the best possible condition and with notable attributes such as authors’ annotations and presentation inscriptions. The depth and breadth of his holdings were truly extraordinary—spanning the twentieth century and including focused concentrations on such movements as the Lost Generation, the Beats, and the Harlem Renaissance.

Beginning in 1997, after Burden’s sudden death the previous year, his family has made a gift to the Morgan of twelve thousand volumes from his collection. Gatsby to Garp: Modern Masterpieces from the Carter Burden Collection, on view from May 20 through September 7, brings together nearly one hundred outstanding works from the collection, including first editions, manuscripts, letters, and revised galley proofs.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston presents the exhibition The Inscrutable Eye: Watercolors by John Singer Sargent, which includes eight paintings that explore the artist’s relationship with the museum’s founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner. The show runs concurrent to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s exhibition John Singer Sargent Watercolors.

Sargent and Gardner shared a long-lasting friendship after meeting at the artist’s studio in London in 1886 by arrangement of their mutual friend, the writer Henry James. Besides the watercolors, the exhibition includes personal mementos such as letters and photographs that span their lifelong friendship.

The Gardner Museum is home to numerous works by Sargent as Gardner acquired 42 of his paintings during their acquaintance. The institution’s holdings span every stage of Sargent’s career and include genre paintings, formal oil paintings, watercolors, studies for public murals and personal sketches. Gardner acquired many of the watercolor paintings on display through buying gifts Sargent made for his friends as they came onto the public market.

The Inscrutable Eye: Watercolors by John Singer Sargent will be on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through January 20, 2014.

The Dallas-based auction company, Heritage, will host a number of sales featuring objects from Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s (1841-1919) personal archive starting on September 19, 2013 in New York. Items include the artist’s eyeglasses, funeral receipts, clothing, paperwork, photos, medals, statues and books signed by fellow artists. The sale will also include letters and writings by Renoir that detail his travels, inspirations for paintings and relationships with models and dealers.

During the 1970s, Renoir’s heirs moved from France to Canada and then to Texas, taking the artist’s belongings with them. The trove, which will be broken into 150 lots, has been stored in various spots across North America until now. Scholars are hoping that an institutional buyer will step up and make a bulk purchase as the collection holds significant historic value.

The collection was put up for auction once before in 2005 but it failed to sell. Following the sale, anonymous buyers from Arizona purchased the lot. They are now consigning the works to Heritage.

The Meadows Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas has acquired an album of drawings, photographs and letters amassed by the sugar tycoon and art collector William Hood Stewart. Stewart was an avid collector of European art and the Modern Spanish School and his holdings include correspondence with artists such as Jean-August-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) and Jéan-Léon Gerôme as well as with fellow collectors. The Meadows Museum acquired the album from New York’s Spanierman Gallery for an undisclosed amount.

The collection will be presented at the Meadows Museum in the exhibition The Stewart Album: Art, Letters and Souvenirs to an American Patron in Paris from August 25 through November 10, 2013. While Stewart had a sizable estate in his hometown of Philadelphia, he spent much of time in Paris, socializing with the artists he so admired. Stewart’s unique collection provides a glimpse into the careers, personal lives and artistic developments of a number of important European artists.

In 1898, Seven years after Stewart’s death, his collection was broken up at an auction and paintings were dispersed among the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a handful of other institutions. The Meadows Museum is planning to organize an exhibition that will reunite parts of Stewart’s collection that were separated over 100 years ago.