Feature Articles


April Issue 2002

The NC Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, Loans 18th-Century European Works To Wilmington's New Art Museum

Ten paintings and sculptures from the North Carolina Museum of Art's collection will help commemorate the April opening of Wilmington's new Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum, formerly the St. John's Museum of Art. The exhibition Eighteenth-Century European art from the North Carolina Museum of Art celebrates the inauguration of the Cameron Art Museum's new building and will remain on view through April 2003.

"It's a privilege to be part of this highly anticipated cultural event," said David Steel, curator of European art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. "The paintings and sculpture we're lending to the new Cameron Art Museum represent a high-quality selection of the art being created during the period around and following the incorporation of Wilmington in the early 1730s."

Works from Great Britain, France and Italy are included in the exhibition, and the paintings and sculpture often tell viewers as much about the art patrons of this period as about the artists themselves.

"Eighteenth-century artists frequently drew inspiration from the stones and histories of antiquity," explained Steel. "Judging from the vast numbers of these works that were painted, drawn and carved, these subjects were clearly quite popular with the men and women who commissioned and collected them." Sebastiano Ricci's Continence of Scipio and Alexander and the Family of Darius explore scenes drawn from the history of the Roman Empire, for example, and in Francois Desportes's still life, Urn of Flowers with Fruits and Hare,the sacrifice of Iphigenia from Greek mythology is represented on the urn, itself a replica of an ancient Medici vase. And Jean-Marc Nattier's Portrait of a Lady as a Vestal Virgin depicts an aristocratic French woman (likely an art patron herself) dressed as one of the virgins who tended the sacred fire in the ancient Roman temple of Vesta.

Other works on loan to the Cameron Art Museum are François Boucher's Abduction of Europa, Étienne Maurice Falconet's sculptures Cupid and Psyche, Sir Thomas Lawrence's portrait of Canova, and two other portraits by Nathaniel Dance and Jean-Baptiste Peironeau.

The North Carolina Museum of Art is also lending additional works from its permanent collection to other institutions both across the state and nation and around the world over the next year. "Having our painting and sculpture travel to significant museums around the world underscores the importance of our collection on a global level," said Museum Director Lawrence J. Wheeler. "But equally important are those loans to institutions right here within the state, which allow us opportunities for collaboration with terrific museums and galleries and, most important, allow us to share with even more people across NC the treasures that can be found at "their" Museum of Art."

William Charles Anthony Frerichs's The Falls of Tamahaka, Cherokee Country, North Carolina is already on long-term loan to the Asheville Art Museum. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Panama Girls will be displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, between March and June, and March also begins two years of travel for the Nigerian Sawfish Headdress to four museums across the nation as part of the exhibition Ways of the Rivers, showing at the NC Museum of Art in 2004. On an international scale in 2002, Pieter Aertsen's A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms travels to Vienna and Germany; Edward Ruscha's Scratches on the Film visits the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; and Moshe Kupferman's Untitled is featured in a major retrospective of Kupferman's work in Jerusalem.

For more information call the museum at 919/839-6262 or visit the NCMA's Web site at (www.ncartmuseum.org).

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