Director’s Letter

The Dahesh Museum is sharing artworks from its collection with other institutions in some very interesting special exhibitions confirming our founding principle that the history of 19th-century art is more complex and inclusive than traditionally presented. Our collection of academic art is now well known, and we are delighted that we can provide individual works and even complete exhibitions that expand the boundaries of artistic achievement in 19th-century Europe and America.

First, a quick note on how we process these loan requests. Museum staff evaluates the condition of the works, the quality of the museum, the significance of the exhibition’s subject, and its lasting impact (for instance, is a catalogue planned?). We then make our recommendation to the Museum Board and, if approved, begin detailed planning with the requesting institution.

Two exhibitions have recently concluded that fully met our standards. The first was a universally praised, comprehensive exhibition devoted to one of our favorite artists, Rosa Bonheur, which opened in Bordeaux (her ville natale) and then moved to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Almost 30 years ago the Dahesh Museum collaborated with the same Bordeaux museum on a similarly comprehensive exhibition. Our exhibition and the excellent English-language catalogue, Rosa Bonheur: All Nature’s Children [see Publications], which included specially commissioned texts by noted scholars and Dahesh Museum staff, were highly praised at the time.

A splendid exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism, included three of our artworks and explored the ways that the style and substance of French Orientalism—one of our strengths—influenced American artists and their representations of the American West in art and popular culture. Years of research went into this exhibition, which will surely add new interpretative possibilities to both Eastern and Western art.

Coming up, as I write this, is another topical interrogation of academic art’s increasing importance in art history. An international team of scholars is organizing Pre-Raphaelites: A Modern Renaissance that will pair Pre-Raphaelite and Italian Renaissance art in a glorious facility, the Musei San Domenico in Forlì, Italy. Three Dahesh paintings are included, so plan your trip there sometime after February 24, 2024. More immediately, the Palace of Versailles is appropriately devoting an exhibition to Horace Vernet (1789–1862), who was a key figure at Versailles over a period of 13 years during the reign of Louis-Philippe, producing some of the most beautiful paintings in the Historical Galleries. Always a brilliant and popular painter, at the time of his death Vernet was France’s most famous artist, admired and imitated throughout Europe. As I write this, we are making final preparations for sending two paintings.

Finally, we are pleased to share with the Vero Beach (Florida) Museum of Art Encountering Egypt and Beyond: Orientalist Masterworks from the Dahesh Museum of Art, opening January 2024. This exhibition emphasizes the role Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign contributed to the birth of scholarly and artistic study of Ancient and Islamic Egypt, leading to wider Western engagement in the greater Middle East. We have explored Orientalism from our earliest days and documented the Napoleonic story in the 2006 exhibition and catalogue Napoleon on the Nile [see Publications]. We are pleased to share this extraordinary material with a growing list of museums.

J. David Farmer
Director of Exhibitions