onists, Gustave Caillebotte, was the subject of a retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris, that was later shown at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition included a number of works from U.S. museums, including the 1877 "Paris Street: Rainy Day," owned by the Art Institute.
An exhibition devoted to the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir was seen in a number of Australian cities. The exhibit, which began in the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, in mid-1994, traveled to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne before closing in early 1995 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. The works, which included 51 paintings and one sculpture, were part of European and American collections and covered most of the major aspects of the artist’s career. An Australian show comprising more than 150 works by Henri Matisse was on view at the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, and the National Gallery of Victoria. The exhibition, which was on loan, included items drawn from collections throughout the world. It was the first antipodean show devoted to Matisse.
Whistler, who spent most of his life in England, was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition at the Tate late in 1994. The show, which encompassed the entire range of Whistler’s life and work--drawings in several different mediums, paintings, and examples of decorative schemes--was also mounted at the Orsay Museum in Paris and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Whistler’s famous portraits were well represented and familiar, but some of his later paintings, including some splendid examples of fireworks, were less well-known. One of these, "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The falling rocket," came under such harsh criticism by John Ruskin when it was first exhibited (1877) in London that Whistler filed and won a celebrated lawsuit for libel.
"Whistler and Japan," an exhibition at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., focused on Whistler’s works in the museum’s own collections and the Japanese influence on his work during the 1860s and ’70s. The Freer Gallery works--never loaned--were therefore not among the paintings represented in the large Whistler show.
A number of interesting shows concentrated on manuscript illumination. Italian book illustration was the focus of an exhibition in London at the Royal Academy of Arts and later on view in New York City at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The show, entitled "The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illustration 1450-1550," included 137 superb examples covering such diverse themes as classical and humanist texts, liturgical and biblical manuscripts, and patrons of the Italian Renaissance. The show, which was organized by subject rather than chronologically, encompassed a very wide range of beautiful objects and covered a subject less well-known than other examples of Italian Renaissance painting.
Some 100 items, including painted panels and manuscript illuminations, were included in the exhibition "Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Illuminated manuscripts were also displayed in a series of exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif. One show running in late winter and early spring featured animal mythology and included illustrations of fables and games.
"The Art of Devotion" at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam comprised 44 works--paintings, prints, books, sculpture, and objects in gold and silver--some of which were borrowed from foreign collections. Most were made in monasteries to be used by monks for private devotion and were therefore relatively small. Most of the images and objects, which dated from 1300 to 1500, were portable, and a series of miniature prints could easily be carried within the pages of a book. Objects from the show were displayed in darkened rooms and illuminated in isolated cases that were lit in such a way that the contents seemed to float in space.
An exhibition devoted to the 15th-century Flemish artist Hans Memling was enormously popular when it was shown in late 1994 in Bruges, Belgium. The