This exhibition is anchored by an extraordinary group of nine Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocratic portraits from about 1580 to 1620 that has been the focus of an ongoing research project involving the NCMA Conservation and Curatorial departments and students and faculty from UNC–Chapel Hill and Duke. The exhibition also provides the opportunity to reexamine familiar favorites in the collection from new perspectives and to display a few “hidden treasures” that have rarely—or never before—been on public view. 

History and Mystery is one in a series of permanent collection focus exhibitions highlighting the work of the NCMA’s Conservation Department. 

Organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources; the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.; and the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment for Educational Exhibitions. Research for this exhibition was made possible by Ann and Jim Goodnight/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund for Curatorial and Conservation Research and Travel.