MetPublications

Grenville L. Winthrop (1864–1943) was a lawyer and banker by profession, but his true passion was collecting art. He had the resources, the intuition, and talented advisers to help him create a collection that is distinct not only in its depth and breadth, but also in its quality. The Winthrop Collection of French, British, and American art includes the best group of Delacroix and Ingres drawings outside of France, the most significant group of pre-Raphaelite paintings outside of Britain, and a world-renowned collection of Sargent watercolors. Some seventy paintings and twice as many drawings and watercolors by more than fifty French, British, and American artists will be featured in this selection from the legendary Winthrop Collection, bequeathed in 1943 to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Masterpieces by David, Ingres, Géricault, Chassériau, and Moreau will be seen alongside great works by Blake, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, as well as Homer, Sargent, and Whistler. They are discussed in the catalogue by more than sixty authors, all of whom are among the leading authorities in their various fields.

Few things are more exciting than the rediscovery of a lost but storied work of art. This Bulletin examines Charles Le Brun’s spectacular Everhard Jabach (1618–1695) and His Family, a landmark of Western portraiture that was long thought destroyed—known only from photographs taken before World War II—when it was found hanging in an English country house, where it had languished for more than a century prior to its acquisition by The Met. The authors tease out the many secrets bound up in Le Brun’s canvas and its extraordinary sitter, who was one of the greatest art collectors of seventeenth-century Europe.

German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany has been published in connection with the largest and most important exhibition devoted to nineteenth-century German paintings and drawings ever held in North America. Nineteenth-century German art, eclectic in its expression, was strongly influenced by the political, social, and economic forces of an intellectually fertile age. The ninety-six paintings and fifty-four drawings included in this catalogue focus on the five major German artistic movements from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth century: Romanticism, the Nazarenes, Idealism, Realism, and Impressionism. Among the artists represented are Friedrich, Runge, Blechen, Cornelius, Koch, Leibl, Lenbach, Menzel, Thoma, Corinth, Liebermann, and Slevogt. German Masters of the Nineteenth Century provides a penetrating view of the pluralistic character of nineteenth-century German art. Essays by Professor Gert Schiff, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Dr. Stephan Waetzoldt, General Director, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, provide a careful examination of artists and styles and an analysis of the historical, social, and aesthetic contexts so crucial to a full understanding of nineteenth-century German art. This volume also includes a biography of each artist and an extensive bibliography. The works included here, their accompanying texts, and the scholarly essays comprise a publication indispensable to scholars and art lovers with an interest in this long-neglected but significant period of European art.

Friends, rivals, and at times antagonists, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas maintained a pictorial dialogue throughout their lives as they both worked to define the painting of modern urban life. Manet/Degas, the first book to consider their careers in parallel, investigates how their objectives overlapped, diverged, and shaped each other’s artistic choices. Enlivened by archival correspondence and records of firsthand accounts, essays by American and French scholars take a fresh look at the artists’ family relationships, literary friendships, and interconnected social and intellectual circles in Paris; explore their complex depictions of race and class; discuss their political views in the context of wars in France and the United States; compare their artistic practices; and examine how Degas built his personal collection of works by Manet after his friend’s premature death. An illustrated biographical chronology charts their intersecting lives and careers. This lavishly illustrated, in-depth study offers an opportunity to reevaluate some of the most canonical French artworks of the nineteenth century, including Manet’s Olympia, Degas’s The Absinthe Drinker, and other masterworks.

Every two years the fall issue of The Met's quarterly Bulletin celebrates notable recent acquisitions and gifts to the collection. Highlights of Recent Acquisitions 2020–2022 include the Mantuan Roundel by Gian Marco Cavalli, a recently rediscovered tour de force from the early Renaissance; the archive of photographer James Van Der Zee, one of the most celebrated chroniclers of Black life in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance; a pair of sculptures by the renowned contemporary American artist Robert Gober; Thomas Sully’s magisterial portrait of Queen Victoria; and Poussin’s Agony in the Garden, one of only two accepted works by the artist in oil on copper. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of The Met collection.

Every two years the fall issue of the Met's quarterly Bulletin celebrates notable recent acquisitions and gifts to the collection. Highlights of recent acquisitions from 2014–2016 include Charles Le Brun's Everhard Jabach (1618–1695) and His Family, a donation of nearly 1,300 works of art from East and South Asia, three hundred masterpieces of Japanese Art from the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, more than two hundred works by American photographer Irving Penn, and Untitled (Studio) by Kerry James Marshall among many others. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of the Met's collection.

Every two years the fall issue of the Met's quarterly Bulletin celebrates notable recent acquisitions and gifts to the collection. Highlights of Recent Acquisitions 2016–2018 include The Battle of the Little Bighorn by Standing Bear, a Lakota artist who fought in that famous conflict as a young man; Riverbank, an exceedingly rare Chinese landscape from the tenth century; Francesco Salviati’s recently rediscovered portrait of the Florentine doctor Carlo Rimbotti;, and examples of a Qur’an and a Hebrew Bible from medieval Spain. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of the Met's collection.

Every two years the fall issue of The Met's quarterly Bulletin celebrates notable recent acquisitions and gifts to the collection. Highlights of Recent Acquisitions 2022–2024 include the monumental handscroll painting Streams and Mountains without End, a masterwork by the Qing-dynasty painter Wang Yuanqi; the nineteenth century painting Bélizaire and the Frey Children which offers a rare depiction of an identified Black teenager with the children of his enslaver; Helene Schjerfbeck’s The Lace Shawl, which is a layered, dramatic portrait of the artist’s friend and landlady. Meanwhile, Leopoldo Méndez’s linocut depiction of the great Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada expands the already distinguished collection of twentieth-century Mexican graphic arts in the Department of Drawings and Prints. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of The Met collection.