Museum of Fine Arts . St. Petersburg, Florida . Exhibitions . Permanent Collection

Works from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, including Claude Monet's, Le Parlement, dffet de brouillard.

Abraham Bloemaert (Dutch, 1564-1651)
Christ and the Samaritan Woman, 1624 or 1626
Oil on canvas, 44 x 42 inches
Museum purchase with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Wally Bishop in memory of Mrs. John F. Carson 75.5

Bloemaert was the leading landscape and history painter in Utrecht. He also taught other important Dutch painters, including Jan Both and Hendrick Terbrugghen. A significant part of his output included altar pieces for Catholic churches and private chapels for which this painting may have been completed. It depicts the story of Christ meeting with the woman of Samaria from the Gospel of John (4:1-20), a parable of tolerance. While the religious authorities of Jesus's day generally denounced and shunned the Samaritans as heretical, he does not reject this woman. Rather, he extends to her and her compatriots the hand of compassion and possible salvation. Bloemaert infuses the painting with layers of meaning. Jacob's well is not merely a picturesque setting for a meeting of strangers, but a symbol of the sacrament of baptism. The butterfly at Christ's feet represents the transitory nature of human existence. The cross like armature for the well pulley, above Christ's head, provides a tragic foreboding of his future martyrdom.

Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (French, 1755-1842)
Julie Lebrun as Flora, 1799
Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 38 3/8 inches
Museum purchase with funds provided by the
Rexford Stead Art Purchase Fund 83.5

Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun's fashionable style combining charm and simplicity made her one of the most popular portrait painters in Paris before she was 20 years old. During a career that spanned more than seventy years, she painted some 800 portraits and documented noted members of the French aristocracy. She made more than thirty portraits alone of Queen Marie Antoinette. A staunch Royalist, Vigee-Lebrun was forced to leave France with her daughter at the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1789.

This monumental portrait of her only child Jeanne Julie Louise at nineteen is considered one of her most important paintings. She completed it in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the family lived in exile from 1795 to 1801. To symbolize her youthful beauty, Vigee-Lebrun portrayed Julie as Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers. Julie's flowing dress and scarf were probably inspired by antique decorative motifs found at recently excavated Pompeii, located near Naples, where the Lebrun's lived sporadically after leaving France.

Berthe Morisot (French, 1841-1895)
La Lecture (Reading), 1888
Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 x 36 1/2 inches
Museum purchase in memory of Margaret Acheson Stuart 81.2

Berthe Morisot's mother arranged drawing lessons for her three daughters with no other intention than cultivating a polite pastime. That Berthe emerged with professional aspirations must have caused some consternation in their upper-middle-class Parisian household, since it might have compromised her future responsibilities as a wife and mother. Between 1864 and 1868 Morisot exhibited at the Paris Salon. Her early contact with the plein air Barbizon painter Camille Corot and her meeting Edouard Manet, whose work was reviled by both critics and Salon officials, encouraged her to repudiate the Salon system. As a result, she began to follow a more independent path and to exhibit her work with the Impressionists. She married Eugene Manet, Edouard's younger brother in 1874, the year the Impressionists held their first controversial exhibition.

Reading is at once a genre scene and a portrait of Jeanne Bonnet. It conveys Morisot's ability to integrate her art and family life by painting canvases of domestic scenes. Although out-of-doors, the space of Reading is shallow, compressed by a balcony railing and foliage. Morisot employed many compositional devices-the bird cage, the railing and chair, the wall casement, and the palm frond that arches over the sitter's head-to enclose the figure. These forms, associated with the nineteenth-century feminine ideal, also picture a woman's space as a closed world turned in on itself.

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)
Le Parlement, effet de brouillard (Parliament, Effect of Fog), 1904
Oil on canvas, 32 1/2 x 36 1/2 inches
Gift of Charles and Margaret Stevenson Henderson and Friends of Art 79.5

Many critics and art historians consider Monet the supreme Impressionist painter because of his intense interest in and exploration of light and color. Monet first lived in England during the Franco-Prussian War (1869-70). In the fall of 1899 he and his wife visited London, where their son Michel was studying English. During this stay and subsequent extended visits, Monet worked on a series of paintings of Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, and the River Thames.

Parliament, Effect of Fog is one of nineteen recorded paintings of Parliament completed by Monet between 1900 and 1904. The various scenes show the effects of fog at different times of the day, capturing its polychromatic reflections on the Thames. These paintings of London were not so much views of the city through a veil of atmosphere as views of the veil itself, an "envelope," to use the artist's own words.

Works from the 18th and 19th centuries, including Georgia O'Keeffe's Poppy.

George Inness (American, 1824-1894)
Early Moonrise, Florida, 1893
Oil on canvas, 42 1/4 x 32 inches
Gift of Costas Lemonopoulos 83.6

George Inness attempted to reconcile the poetry of nature with what he actually saw. He strongly believed that art must not imitate objective appearances. His early landscapes were inspired by the Hudson River School and the seventeenth-century classic landscapes of Claude Lorrain. And his later landscapes are hazy evocations of nature, suggestive of his spiritual approach.

Between 1891 and 1894, Inness and his wife Elizabeth spent winters in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Shortly before his death, he produced a number of important works, among them Early Moonrise, Florida. The Museum's painting was created on his third visit to the state. It depicts the passage of the season and the movement of time through moisture-laden mists and vapors. The evening sky is filled with clouds of pink, blue, and mauve, which cluster low on the horizon and reflect the last pastel hues of the setting sun. A luminous moon shines from a bare patch of sky framed by tall, thin trees. Inness's works in general are the fullest expression of his devotion to the religious teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed that the earthly realm is a conduit for the heavenly one. In his late paintings, nature is suffused with spirituality.

Robert Henri (American, 1865-1929)
Village Girl--Lily Cow, 1915
Oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 20 1/8 inches
Gift of the Stuart Society in honor of the Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Museum of Fine Arts 90.20

Robert Henri is one of the most influential twentieth-century American realists. Not only is he known for his paintings but also for the legacy of his teaching and writing. His book The Art Spirit (1923) is still widely read by artists and scholars.

After returning from Paris where he studied from 1881 to 1891, Henri led his students and colleagues in pursuit of a new American art. His chief, early followers were newspaper and magazine illustrators whom he encouraged to become painters: John Sloan, William J. Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn. These artists became known for their bravura brushwork and their depiction of gritty urban scenes, as well as for their portraits of street people and vaudeville performers. They were later dubbed the Ashcan School.

To protest the exhibition policies of the National Academy of Design, Henri resigned in 1907 and the following year organized an exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York. He, along with Luks, Shinn, Glackens, Sloan, Ernest Lawson, Arthur B. Davies, and Maurice Prendergast, participated in the show. They were referred to as the Eight. (Only Glackens and Lawson are not represented in the Museum's collection.) Indeed, a Shinn watercolor of the Nativity was a gift of the first docent class in 1964, one year before the Museum opened to the public.

After 1909, Henri started to experiment with the elaborate color theories of Hardesty Maratta. This led to brighter tonalities and vibrant intensity of hues in his palette, exemplified in Village Girl--Lily Cow. Although dozens of portraits of children exist in Henri's body of work, few match the sweet exuberance and vibrancy of this one.

Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Poppy, 1927
Oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches
Gift of Charles C. and Margaret Stevenson Henderson in memory of Jeanne Crawford Henderson 71.32

When she died in 1986 at the age of ninety-eight, Georgia O'Keeffe left behind approximately nine hundred paintings, rooted in a uniquely American vision. As early as 1897 flowers had interested O'Keeffe, but it was not until 1924 that she began to investigate the potential for abstraction in a single flower filling an entire canvas. The blossoms themselves fascinated her, not foliage or plants in their natural setting.

Poppy is one of a major, early series of flower paintings. The flower fills the canvas, and its petals open to reveal its dark velvet inner core. Brilliant, expansive reds create strong, warm shapes from which small details emerge in powerful three-dimensionality. The light background of this solitary image can be read as an undulating mountain range or alternately, as a cavelike enclosure.

O'Keeffe's Poppy is one of the Museum's most widely published works and has been reproduced in a number of leading studies on the artist. In Becoming O'Keeffe: The Early Years (Abbeville Press, 1991), Sarah Whittaker Peters breaks the measured tone of her book by calling this Poppy "breathtakingly beautiful."

Works from individuals who first promoted photography as a highly expressive art form, including Gertrude Käsebier and Aaron Siskind.

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Manger Scene, 1899
Platinum and gum bichromate, 8 1/8 x 5 7/8 inches
Gift of Mina Turner 74.14

A founding member in 1902 of the Photo Secession, which promoted photography as a highly expressive art form, Kasebier was considered one of the leading portrait photographers of her time. Like contemporaries Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White, she experimented with diverse ways of manipulating the negative and final print that challenged the medium's mechanical stereotype. With textured papers and dark room techniques, she also produced images that seem distant from the photography of the day. Her works recall Old Master prints, Dutch interiors, and fin-de-siècle Symbolist compositions of painters like Belgian Ferdinand Khnopff. The madonnas, angels, and other figures in Kasebier's work were often friends and family members. As in the Museum's photograph, Kasebier almost always portrayed women as nurturing and maternal figures.

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Martha's Vineyard 4, 1950
Gelatin silver print

A native New Yorker, Siskind began photographing in 1930, working in a documentary style. While affiliated with the Workers Film and Photo League, he produced studies of contemporary New York: Dead End: Bowery; Harlem Document; and Portrait of a Tenement. In fact, the Museum has his work Showgirl, Harlem, 1937, in the collection, along with seventeen other photographs, all but two donated by Dr. Robert and Chitranee Drapkin.

Around 1940, Siskind began visiting Martha's Vineyard during the summer. He photographed discarded objects and unusual still lifes including seaweed, bones, and shells. He also focused on other basic objects and subjects--natural and manufactured--and gave them new life in his works. Such photographs reflect the art form's transformative power.

His preoccupation with form impelled him to move from documentary photography to powerful abstract images; his photographs of Martha's Vineyard were among his first abstractions from nature. Martha's Vineyard 4 was inspired by the impressive stone walls he discovered in the area. Reminiscent of some primitive monument like Stonehenge, the shapes here are textural. Such compositions, found in nature, but assertively non-representational, place Siskind at the forefront of Abstract Expressionism in photography.

Take a step back in time and witness the evolution of art - from Roman sculptures to Peruvian gold.

Torso of Aphrodite
Roman, AD Second Century
Marble, 34 inches high
Gift of the Stuart Society of the Museum of Fine Arts 95.3

Classical Greek female nudes are usually identified as Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Venus, the Roman mythological counterpart, was widely reproduced in miniature and monumental sizes, and in diverse media, including stone, bronze, and terracotta. Because they were popular in imperial Rome, Venuses became generic representations of feminine charm, for these statues capture the moment when a woman, mortal or divine, is glimpsed performing her private rituals of bathing and dressing.

Since many Greek sculptures have not survived, Roman copies provide a means to study their predecessors. Some female nudes such as those by the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles (Fourth Century B.C.) provide a more realistic depiction than the idealized figures of the Fifth Century B.C. His Aphrodite of Knidos (no longer extant) is a prime example. In the Museum's work, strongly related to a Venus de Milo-type figure, Aphrodite stands with her weight on her right leg, while the left leg is slightly bent. The drapery, which does not completely cover the body, draws attention to the figure's gentle pose.

Gold Effigy Beaker (Kero)
Peru, Sicán/Batán Grandes Area of Lambayeque Valley, Middle Chimú, c. 950-1250
Gold hammered and embossed, 7 3/4 inches high
Gift of Dr. Mark Sheppard 77.3

This kero (or beaker) of beaten gold was created by the indigenous Chimú culture of northern Peru prior to its domination by the Inca in the fifteenth century. Gold was highly prized by the Peruvians and was even thought to be the congealed "tears of the gods." The artistry required to fashion such a large container with ornate relief elements represents this culture's highly skilled metal-working tradition. The design of the beaker is well suited to its shape. When inverted, the lower embossed band serves as a collar, and the two bands at the top become a flat cap. Several gold keros of this type bear upside-down faces. Only when empty can these beakers be placed bottom-side up to display the face of the god.

Svetambara Jaina (or Jain) Household Shrine
India, Gujarat, Patan, c. 1800
Carved and painted wood, 98 1/2 x 69 1/2 x 32 inches
Gift of Louis E. Seley and sons Hervey and Elliott, Jr. 66.18

Jainism was founded by the Sage Mahavira (599-527 BC), a contemporary of Buddha. The religion, dedicated to asceticism and total non-violence, survives to this day though it has far fewer followers than the older Hindu religions. This shrine is one of only seven currently known to be held in museum collections worldwide. It was probably used for worship in an affluent Jaina family and displays a number of iconographic features. Behind the closed doors was the sacred image, or icon, of one of the twenty-four holy men of the Jaina religion. Celebratory religious figures dancing and playing musical instruments adorn the shrine. They reflect the joy with which the family member would approach the icon housed in the shrine.

Please Note: Additional exhibitions are in the development stage. Exhibitions may be subject to change.

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