Collection: Painting and Sculpture

Painting and Sculpture

The Painting and Sculpture collection contains more than 2,500 works of European and American art from the Middle Ages to 1960.

The Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods are represented by the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Lippo Memmi, Jacopo Sansovino, Alessandro Magnasco, and others. The collection also includes major work by such northern European masters as Tilman Riemenschneider, Hendrick Goltzius, Joachim Wtewael, and Salomon van Ruysdael.

17th- and 18th-century masterpieces include paintings by Francisco Collantes, Sebastien Bourdon, Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, Nicolas Poussin, Angelica Kauffmann, and Joshua Reynolds.

Early 19th-century European art is represented by Thomas Lawrence, Hubert Robert, Louise-Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont, Joseph Chinard, Théodore Géricault and others.

The department has excellent examples of the French Impressionist and Post- Impressionist schools by such artists as Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. There is important work by 19th-century French sculptors Auguste Rodin, Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, Jules Dalou, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.

Among the 20th-century European painters in the collection are Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Fernand Léger, and Oskar Kokoschka.

The 18th- and 19th-century American collection is particularly strong, with important examples by such artists as John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, Martin Johnson Heade, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Mitchell Bannister, an African-American landscapist who spent his career as a painter in Rhode Island.

Significant works by George Wesley Bellows, Robert Henri, Charles Sheeler, Maxfield Parrish, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Twachtman, Hans Hofmann, Paul Manship, and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, among others, represent American artistic achievements of the early 20th-century.

The superlative Nancy Sayles Day Collection of Latin American Art features paintings by Joaquín Torres-Garcia, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta Echuarren, and others. This collection also encompasses works on paper and decorative arts made by Latin American artists.