European Art

The Museum’s collection of European art comprises paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts from the medieval period to the twentieth century. Built over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by gifts and purchases, the collection offers a broad view of artistic production across the European continent. 

The Museum’s medieval holdings feature an array of materials and techniques, including stained glass, architectural sculpture and fragments, enamels, and ivories. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century collection features Italian, Spanish, and Netherlandish panel paintings by artists such as Guido da Siena, Fra Angelico, and the Workshop of Gerard David, as well as Spanish and German polychrome sculptures. The Museum’s seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings include works by Hendrik Goltzius, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Anthony van Dyck, while narratives of religious expansion come to the fore in the Italian painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli’s luminous oil sketch The Triumph of the Name of Jesus (1676–79). 

In the eighteenth century, Jacques-Louis David’s legacy as a teacher is visualized in The Death of Socrates (after 1787), and Angelica Kauffmann’s depiction of a renowned soprano, Portrait of Sarah Harrop (Mrs. Bates) as a Muse (1780–81), centers the role of women in both the visual and performing arts. Nineteenth-century highlights include Francisco Goya’s haunting watercolor on ivory, Monk Talking to an Old Woman (1824–25), which exemplifies the artist’s radical experimentation with artistic process, and Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Napoleon in Egypt (1867–68), which challenges European imperial ambitions. Late nineteenth-century artistic movements such as Realism and Impressionism are represented in works by Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Claude Monet. The early twentieth-century collection is grounded in a significant corpus of paintings by Gabriele Münter, including her Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel (1908–9).  

The collection continues to grow; recent acquisitions have broadened its geographic scope and increased the representation of women artists, with Torah finials by Hester Bateman, a  Self-Portrait by Charlotte Bonaparte, and two paintings by Bertha Wegmann. Ongoing research in the department includes projects related to the Museum’s collection of stained glass, architectural elements, seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting, and nineteenth-century French painting.