Impressionist Works at the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco
Jun 30th, 2010 by sophie smith
If you really love Impressionist Art, then you owe yourself a trip to San Francisco and the de Young museum. Throughout the summer, until September 6, the museum has an exhibit titled, “The Birth of Impressionism,” and features masterpieces from one of France’s best known museums, the Musee’ d’Orsay . It’s your chance to see in the United States art rarely available on this continent.
The exhibit contains a hundred, amazing paintings from the mid-to-late 19th century in France, including the American expatriate James Whistler’s “Arrangement in Gray and Black,” which is known by most people as “Whistler’s Mother.” That’s just the start, though, as the exhibit displays work by Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley, as well as Edgar Degas’ paintings which depict the ballet and racetrack.
The most noted work in this exhibit includes Edouard Manet’s “The Fife Player” (1866); Edgar Degas’ “Racehorses Before the Stands” (1866-1868), “The Dancing Lesson” (1873-1876), and “Portraits of the Stock Exchange” (1878-1879); Claude Monet’s “The Magpie” (1868), “Saint-Lazare Station” (1877) and “Rue Montorgueil, Paris. Festival of June 30, 1878″ (1878); and Gustave Caillebotte’s “The Floor Scrapers” (1875). You’ll also find Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “The Swing” (1876), and Camille Pissarro’s “Red Roofs, Corner of the Village, Winter Effect” (1877).
If for any reason, you can’t make arrangements to get away during the summer and stay in one of the five star hotels in San Francisco , perhaps you can try a bit later in the year, and see the second Impressionist art exhibit held by the de Young. The museum presents, back to back with “The Birth of Impressionism,” “Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musee d’Orsay.” This exhibit will run until January 18th of 2011.
In this second exhibit, you’ll discover more amazing work: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “A Dance in the Country” (1883); George Seurat’s “The Circus” (1891); Paul Cezanne’s “Still Life with Onions” (1895), and Henri Rousseau’s “The Snake Charmer” (1907). You’ll also have the opportunity to see Paul Gauguin’s “Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ” (1889) and “Tahitian Women, On the Beach” (1891). You’ll also witness masterworks of Vincent Van Gogh, including “Self Portrait” (1887), “Starry Night over the Rhone” (1888), and “The Artist’s Bedroom at Arles” (1889).
The de Young and the Legion of Honor museums together make up the organization known as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the largest public arts insitution in the city. If you wish to stop in at the Legion of Honor as well, it’s presenting, until September 26th, an exhibit titled, “Impressionist Paris: City of Light,” taking a close look at Paris and how it’s represented through 150 prints, drawings, paintings, photographs and illustrated books — a companion piece to the exhibits at the de Young.
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