Displaying items by tag: vellum

For centuries, antique prints, drawings and manuscripts were sliced apart, a standard practice that created individual pieces of vellum and paper for sale or display, in the hopes of drawing attention to the art forms. Institutions are now trying to reassemble the dispersed pages and fragments.

Last month, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired medieval works — books, loose pages and bindings — from descendants of Otto F. Ege, a dean at the Cleveland Institute of Art who died in 1951.

Since September 2013, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has acquired a number of important works from the 15th through 20th centuries including tempera-and-gold drawings on vellum from the Middle Ages and works on paper by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin. Earl A. Powell III, the director of the National Gallery of Art, said, “These acquisitions are masterworks from the Middle Ages to the current moment that represent the highest levels of creativity in media ranging from printmaking and manuscript illumination to easel painting and photography. We are delighted that they can be shared with the public as part of our permanent collection.”

Among the museum’s recent acquisitions are a woodcut-illustrated book of Giovanni Boccaccio’s ‘Seminal History of Famous Women’, the Gallery’s earliest German woodcut book; ‘Still Life with Peacock Pie,’ a banquet piece measuring more than four feet across by the Dutch Golden Age painter Pieter Claesz; one of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s finest versions of ‘Avenue of Cypresses at Villa d’Este’; a watercolor by Cézanne titled ‘A Stand of Trees Along a River Bank’; an early drawing by Gauguin titled ‘Seated Nude Seen from Above’; a pastel of Waterloo Bridge by Monet; and Pop artist Jim Dine’s ‘Name Painting.’ The National Gallery of Art also received works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Marc Chagall, Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell from the celebrated Herbert and Dorothy Vogel Collection. 

The National Gallery of Art was established in 1937 for the people of the United States by a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress. Financier and art collector, Andrew W. Mellon, donated a portion of his sizeable art collection to the museum, forming its core holdings. The National Gallery of Art’s collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures and decorative arts spans from the Middle Ages to the present and includes the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas as well as the largest mobile ever created by Alexander Calder.

On March 4, 2013 the Philadelphia Museum of Art announced a number of important acquisitions that will enhance the institution’s European, Latin, and American art collections. The gifts came from various donors including collectors Roberta and Richard Huber, global healthcare company GlaxoSmithKline, and several Museum Trustees.

Among the recent acquisitions is Amaryllis Josephine, a double-page watercolor on vellum by Belgian painter and botanist Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759-1840). A pencil drawing of the flower’s bulb accompanies the watercolor. Both of the works were created as part of a series of engravings made under the patronage of the empress Joséphine, Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife.

The museum also received four 18^th century paintings that are currently on view as part of the exhibition Journeys to New Worlds: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Roberta and Richard Huber Collection (on view through May 19, 2013). The works include King Luis I of Spain on Horseback (unknown artist, Peru); Saint Anthony of Padua Preaching Before Pope Gregory IX (unknown artist Peru); The House at Nazareth (unknown artist, Bolivia); and Our Lady of the Reedbed or Irún with Donor, Captain Joaquín Elorrieta by Ecuadorian artist José Cortés de Alcocer.    

Other acquisitions include 236 photographs by pioneering modern photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976); N.C. Wyeth’s (1890-1976) Trial of the Bow, the first painting to enter the museum’s collection by the artist; and an early 20^th century stained glass and bronze chandelier by Tiffany Studios under the artistic direction of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933).

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will hold an exhibition of its recent acquisitions this summer.