Recent Acquisitions and More on View in European Galleries This Winter

The latest additions to the works on view in the NCMA’s European Galleries, including two new acquisitions, present French perspectives on foreign, colonized nations and peoples. Speaking to the role of models of color in mainland Europe, the racialized power structures that organize imperialist societies, and the impact of visual art on perceptions of overseas nations, these paintings both directly and indirectly address aspects of European history often left undepicted by European artists of the nineteenth century.

Louise Faulque, Study Head of a Woman, 1884

The recent acquisition of Louise Faulque’s Study Head of a Woman denotes the NCMA’s doubling of the amount of works by women artists in the European collection since 2021. Faulque, born to a noble French family, moved to Paris in the late 1870s or early 1880s to pursue an artistic career, studying in ateliers des dames—studios intended for the instruction of women artists. Study Head of a Woman sees Faulque experimenting with the stereotypical portrayal of a woman whose name is not yet known, who was possibly from the French Antilles. Faulque renders her subject with a sensitivity and luminosity that capture a sense of interior life quite strikingly.

“Despite the exoticization of the sitter’s dress,” says Curator of European Art Michele Frederick, “which is exaggerated by the addition of studio props, Faulque’s painting expresses her interest in the subject without the level of objectification found in similar works of the period, like those of Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier or Anna Bilińska.” This artwork “speaks to the essential roles that models of color played in nineteenth-century European art and the presence of people of color in Europe in general.”

Édouard Pingret, Promenade to the Fuente de la India, Havana (La Fiesta de los Quince Años), circa 1850

A royalist artist who fled France after the revolution of 1848, Pingret painted Promenade to the Fuente de la India, Havana (La Fiesta de los Quince Años) while en route to Mexico—which would have an enormous influence on him for the rest of his life. Pingret depicts a procession that’s part of a quinceañera celebration, with three lavishly dressed women led around the Fuente de la India (Fountain of the Indian) by a calesero, or a driver who was usually an enslaved man of African descent.

The central scene, as well as the addition of the fruit sellers sitting under a palm tree, “speak to the racial and class disparities in Cuba,” says Frederick, “with Euro-Cubans occupying the highest spaces.” The painting’s background, specifically the Fuente de la India, provides insight into the movement toward American individuality that took place in Cuba over the course of the eighteenth century. The central figure of the Indian woman, holding a shield with Havana’s coat of arms, aligns the city’s character with an indigenous figure, reinforcing a stronger national identification with America than with Spain, the colonial presence in Cuba at the time. “Pingret’s painting will begin to allow us to tell a more expansive story about the interconnections between Europe and the rest of the world” says Frederick, “a story that we can only currently tell in our galleries through the depiction of things from outside Europe that were then transported to the continent.”

Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros, Crater of Popocatépetl, 1833

Previously the only landscape in the NCMA’s European collection that pictures a non-European location, Gros’s Crater of Popocatépetl maintains a fascinating connection to Pingret’s self-portrait of 1854, which features Popocatépetl in its background. Gros is remembered first and foremost as a diplomat, serving as First Secretary of the French delegation in Mexico from 1831 to 1836. As an artist, he primarily innovated within the field of photography, capturing historic landmarks and experimenting with daguerreotypes. Like Pingret’s painting, Gros’ Latin American landscapes “helped shape the European vision of foreign locales, landscapes, and people,” says Frederick.

In addition to the works above, the following will also be placed on view this December:

• Estelle Witherspoon, “Housetop” Nine-Block Variation, 1968
• Quentin Massys, Christ as the Salvator Mundi, circa 1500–1510
• Giovanni Cariani, Portrait of a Man Wearing a Gold Chain, circa 1525–1530
• Jacopo Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), Portrait of a Woman, circa 1565–1575
• Cima da Conegliano, Virgin and Child in a Landscape, circa 1496
• Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone, Left wing of an altarpiece for San Salvatore Castle at Susegana: Saints Prosdocimus and Peter, circa 1515–1517
• Paris Bordon, Portrait of a Man in Armor, circa 1535–1540