MMFA 2028: From the Hands of the Masters II

FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS II: 
FROM PARMIGIANINO TO MATISSE
April 10 – August 12, 2018

On April 13, 2018, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) unveiled 55 drawings from a Montreal private collection that span from the 16th to the 20th century. As part of this exhibition, the MMFA also presented some twenty other master drawings from artists including Delacroix, Greuze, Ingres and Romney that were recently given to the Museum by the anonymous collector.

FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS II: FROM PARMIGIANINO TO MATISSE brings together works on paper by François Boucher, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Juan Gris, Katsushika Hokusai, Victor Hugo, Henri Matisse, Jean-François Millet, Amadeo Modigliani, Gustave Moreau, Berthe Morisot, Parmigianino, Camille Pissarro, Giorgio Vasari, James McNeill Whistler, and Antoine Watteau.

The exhibition also features a selection of 20 drawings by François Boucher, Eugène Delacroix, Ciro Ferri, Charles de la Fosse, Théodore Géricault, Jacopo Palma il Giovane, Anne-Louis Girodet, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, le Guerchin, Charles-Nicolas Cochin le Jeune, Michel Corneille le Jeune, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jacob Jordaens, Carlo Maratti, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Domenico Piola, Sebastiano Ricci, George Romney, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and Orazio Samacchini, among the artworks given to the Museum by the same anonymous Montreal collector. Many of them are being displayed at the Museum for the first time.

The subjects range from studies for religious compositions to sensuous female nudes, from the Virgin to a ballerina, from male portraits to battling Japanese warriors. Also on display are a variety of landscapes, from a wintry sixteenth-century Northern European village scene to a lush tropical jungle in Venezuela, from the rocky coast of Guernsey to the fields of Normandy and an Impressionist vision of the countryside near Paris, and even the picturesque crossing of an arched bridge in nineteenth-century Japan. Still-lifes from the early period of Cubism also are presented, as is a black paper cut-out of an eagle by the renowned French author Victor Hugo.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is the repository of one of the most important graphic arts collections in Canada, encompassing prints, drawings and photographs that survey over five centuries of graphic achievement and include masterpieces by a broad diversity of artists spanning the history of European and North American art.

Click on images to enlarge them.
All photos above by Nadia Slejskova.
The last image in this article below courtesy of MMFA.

The exhibition is located at the MMFA's Graphic Arts Centre
Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, Level S2 

This exhibition is a successor to a MMFA 2013 exhibition. You can read about the original FROM THE HANDS OF THE MASTERS  here.

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), Study of a Man Gesturing on a Barrel,
Supported by Another Figure for The Raft of the Medusa, 1819,
pen and ink, heightened with gouache on blue paper.
On loan from a private collection.