Art in Japan>European Art 1500-1930>Between Reality and Dreams: 19th-Century British and French Art from the Winthrop Collection of the Fogg Art Museum

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Between Reality and Dreams: 19th-Century British and French Art from the Winthrop Collection of the Fogg Art Museum

by John McGee

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Odalisque with Slave, 1839-40, oil on
canvas, 72x100cm (Photos © President and Fellows of Harvard College, 
Harvard University Art Museums)

With all the figures fabled, fantastic and foreign crowding the National Museum of Western Art, it looks like a Passion Play held at a Renaissance Faire. Noble Arthurian hero Sir Galahad rubs shoulders with exotic dancer Salome. Jesus rises and Moses falls. The Sirens call from the rocks. In this exhibition of often-theatrical paintings from the Winthrop Collection, brooding, bleeding and embracing bodies take center stage. 

This is the first time work from the renowned Winthrop Collection has been shown outside its home, Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum (currently under renovation). Grenville Winthrop (1864-1943) bequeathed over 4,000 works of art to his alma mater, hoping that his collection would prove to impressionable young students that, “Beauty may be found in all countries, in all periods, provided the eye be trained to find it.” 

Gustave Moreau, Apparition, 1876,
oil on canvas, 56x47cm 

Winthrop's own eye wandered through the Orient and the Renaissance, but found particular repose in 19th-century, slightly outré British and French art, especially the Pre-Raphaelites whose work forms the bulk of this show. Winthrop pursued collecting with great rigor and depth, aiming to assemble works that informed or influenced each other as well as those that traced the developments of particular artists. 

This show's focus on 86 paintings and drawings by 18 painters exemplifies Winthrop's conscientious approach. Big themes like Beauty, Love and Faith underline the exhibition divisions—Past and Orient, Mystery and Apparition, Temptation and Corruption, Symbol and Idol. 

Many of the British pieces have a strong sense of literary illustration. William Blake's small visionary watercolor and ink paintings from the early 1800s portray Adam and Eve and other biblical, classical and moral tales in twisted muscle, explosions of light and trails of fire. Flowers, angels and women drawn from classic and modern poetry fill the symbolic pictures of Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Edward Burne-Jones. In fact, the bottom of the frames of many of Rossetti's pictures are inscribed with poems. Exposed flesh and high fashion star in Aubrey Beardsley's ten sensuous, curved black-and-white ink illustrations for Oscar Wilde's 1890s play Salome, familiar to the lovelorn libidos of sensitive teenagers even today. 

Edward Burne-Jones, Pan and Psyche,
1872-74, oil on canvas, 65x53cm 

On the French side, the Winthrop is considered to have the best collection of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres outside France. The six pieces here span his career from 1811-1862 and include the fine modeling and sumptuous surfaces of major works Raphael and the Fornarina (1811-12) and Odalisque with a Slave (1839-40). Gustave Moreau is also well represented. In his wildly popular Apparition (c. 1876), slinky, blonde Salome points at the head of her victim, St. John the Baptist, floating in a halo of intense light. He gives her a perplexed look, blood from his severed neck gushing onto the floor. The nearly life-size figures in two vertical canvases painted more than ten years apart, The Young Man and Death (1856-65) and Jacob and the Angel (1878), show Moreau move from tight, almost academic forms in deep-focused space to passionate, thickly modeled, intense colors in muddy flatness. 

Géricault's lively Bull Market (1817) and a pair of atmospheric color study landscapes by Whistler (c. 1870s) may seem somewhat out of place, but they hint at the other treasures lying in the Winthrop Collection vaults, all of which, until now, you had to walk among Harvard students to see.

The Between Reality and Dreams: 19th-Century British and French Art from the Winthrop Collection of the Fogg Art Museum exhibition was held Nov-Dec 2002 at the Tokyo National Museum of Western Art in Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.