For Students of Art and Lovers of Beauty: Highlights from the Collection of Grenville L. Winthrop

In 1943, Grenville L. Winthrop, a New Yorker and Harvard graduate, bequeathed his legendary collection of approximately 4,000 objects to his alma mater. This installation of a cornerstone of the Fogg’s permanent collection provides an overview of Winthrop’s extraordinary holdings of 19th-century French, British, and American works of art. The collection’s highlights include masterpieces by Jacques-Louis David; remarkable paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, among them his celebrated Raphael and the Fornarina and Odalisque with a Slave; and noteworthy works by other French masters such as Théodore Géricault, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Moreau, and Auguste Rodin. Winthrop’s collection of British artists is dominated by paintings by acclaimed Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, George Frederick Watts, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The path-breaking collector’s avid interest in American art led him to acquire an equally important collection in that field: paintings by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (including his celebrated Nocturne in Blue and Silver), John La Farge, and John Singer Sargent will be displayed with sculpture by Daniel Chester French and Paul Manship.

Organized by Stephan Wolohojian, curator of paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts at the Fogg Museum.