Occasionally it happens: an unknown masterpiece surfaces at an auction. In July 2008 the long lost painting titled "Tax Collectors", by the sixteenth century Flemish master Quentin Massys appeared. In this lecture Larry Silver points out various details that underline the authenticity of the work and dates it at the end of Massys' career - i.e. somewhere between 1525 and 1530. He relates it to earlier work by the master himself (especially to the Moneychanger and his Wife from 1514) as well as to a later copy by Marinus van Reymerswaele. Exploring the Antwerp financial world at the time, Silver argues that with this work Massys created a new type of painting: the non-religious (humanistic) moral genre-painting.

Vermeer’s masterpiece The Milkmaid was recently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, as part of the events in New York City to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s journey from Amsterdam to America in 1609. The Dutch Rijksmuseum gave this work in loan by exception.

This show marks first major showing of the artist’s oeuvre in New York in over thirty years. In addition to the well-known Parisian cityscapes that have traditionally marked him as the “Urban Impressionist,” Caillebotte painted scenes of outdoor life away from the city on the coast of Normandy and in the villages of Yerres and Petit Gennevilliers, where he and his family maintained estates.

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Loge (The Theatre Box), 1874, is a masterpiece of Impressionist painting and one of the most famous works in the Courtauld Gallery’s collection. The exhibition unites this exceptional picture with Renoir’s other paintings of elegant Parisians on display in their loges.

The Courtauld Gallery holds the most important group of works by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) in Britain. This exhibition presents the entire collection for the first time with major paintings such as the iconic Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1887)and Card Players (1892-5) shown alongside rarely seen drawings and watercolours.

No other modernist painter melded the traditions of Jewish Hasidism, eastern Orthodoxy, and western catholic tradition into such dramatically rich and personally significant expressions of biblical narratives. The intersection of Hasidic and Christian iconographies in Chagall’s representations of biblical heroes, prophets, or scenes of the Crucifixion yields an intriguing dynamic tension, which has never been adequately addressed in a major museum exhibition.

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Designed for Pleasure examines—in the context of Japan’s famous floating world—aesthetic, social, and commercial forces active in contemporary art today: fashion, celebrity, marketing, and popular culture. Ukiyo, literally, “floating world,” means something like “going with the flow.” In practice, this implied disporting oneself in the pleasure quarters and theater districts of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka that captivated the popular imagination of Japan from the late seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries.

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One of the most prominent landscape painters of the 19th century, Albert Bierstadt established his reputation with grand-scale and dramatically conceived “Great Pictures” of the American West that embodied the national agenda of expansionism known as Manifest Destiny. A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, an 84 square foot canvas that stands as a pivotal work in Bierstadt’s very public career, was the most important painting to result from the artist’s second western expedition, in 1863.

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J.M.W. Turner (23 April 1775 19 December 1851), was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style can be said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. In the beginning of his career, many of his paintings appeared more detail oriented. He is best known for his abstract images later in life, focused around form and light. These images spoke less about the description of the landscapes than his previous work, instead providing an intent to “stun the soul.”

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In Winter Scene, Guy carefully delineated Brooklyn’s busy intersections and distinctive architecture, as well as the diversity of its inhabitants. While this reportorial approach suggests a local focus, the paintings participate in broader artistic trends that distinguished American scenery as a source of aesthetic beauty and national pride.

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