“There is no intellectual or emotional substitute for the experience of confronting an original masterpiece.” – Paul Mellon, 1983
If you haven’t made it yet, you have less than a month left to visit the “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, & Their Times” exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art.
Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and provided through the collection left behind by connoisseurs Paul and Rachel Lambert Mellon, the exhibit showcases French impressionist paintings, as well as masterpieces from every important school of French art—from Romanticism to the School of Paris.
Overall, it features 74 works from 19th and 20th century masters, including Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, and Vincent van Gogh.
The exhibit is arranged theme-by-theme, beginning with equestrian paintings followed by human pictures and portraits. The next section consists of different views of Paris, plus Impressionist and Post-Impressionist cityscapes.
Nature then surfaces as one finds themselves surrounded by paintings that feature either water or the French countryside—capped off by Vincent van Gogh’s famous The Wheat Field behind St. Paul’s Hospital.
Made up by large, iconic paintings that stray away from the overall theme of sensibility, the final section consists of Rousseau’s Tropical Landscape, Bonnard’s The Dining Room, and Picasso’s The Chinese Chest of Drawers.
The exhibit, which is one not worth missing, will conclude on January 10, 2021. To purchase tickets, click here.
