Wadsworth Atheneum reunites portrait set
Works separated in 1960 after more than 300 years
The Wadsworth Atheneum exhibit “By Her Hand,” was years in the making. This month two new works were unexpectedly added to it.
“By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Italian Women Artists, 1500-1800” opened in September and includes just 60 or so carefully selected works dating from the 16th to 19th centuries, drawn from institutions around the world, focused on the elevation and reevaluation of art by women artists in Italy during the late Renaissance and Baroque periods.
In October, two paintings became available that belonged with others already in the gallery show. So in a rare move, the museum added them.
The paintings are part of a set of four pastels by Rosalba Carriera, one of the featured artists in “By Her Hand.” The set is believed to have stayed together from the time they were painted 400 years ago until the 1960s, when they were divided between two siblings for separate collections.
Two of the pastels, “The Muse Calliope” and “Allegory of Faith,” were in the “By Her Hand” exhibit when it opened at the end of September, and are referenced in the elaborate book that accompanies the show. The book explains that “although small-scale pastel work was sporadically practiced before her, Carriera was the first artist to make intimately sized pastels internationally fashionable.”
The two other pastels, “The Muse Polymnia” and “The Muse Urania,” came up for sale on the art market this past summer and were purchased by the same local collector (whose name has not been released by the museum) who already owned the other two. The collector has loaned all four to the Wadsworth for “By Her Hand.”
“We first heard about the reappearance of the two pastels by Rosalba Carriera in late summer and immediately decided to present them in our show,” said Oliver Tostmann, the Wadsworth’s Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art. “Usually international loan exhibitions of this scale do not add extra works once they open. But despite the challenges that come along with such late inclusions, we are now beyond thrilled to have these two latecomers in our show. They allow us to present Carriera more adequately as the breathtaking artist that she was.”
The complete set has never been seen in the U.S. until now. The exhibit, moves to the Detroit Institute of Arts in February, but without the Carriera pastels, which are designated as part of the Hartford showing only.
The “By Her Hand” exhibition catalogue, which Tostmann co-edited with Eve Straussman-pflanzer, says scholars have defined the pastel series as “personifications of faith and astrology, together with the muses Calliope and Polymnia.” It describes the the women in the portraits as “chaste — they avoid direct eye contact. Since they are depicted with books, they can perhaps be better interpreted as sibyls, who are usually shown writing or reading.” The catalogue speculates that the set may “present the ancient seers announcing the coming of Christ and his Passion, a well-known typological conceit from the Renaissance to the late Baroque periods,” and notes that “no other figures by Rosalba Carriera have been identified as sibyls, which makes the cycle rare in her oeuvre.”
The Wadsworth Atheneum, at 600 Main St., was founded in 1842 and is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States. This month the museum announced that it was changing its leadership model from a single director/ceo to two people in those positions. Jeffrey Brown was named CEO, and the search is still underway for a new director.