Exhibition 'Renaissance to Romanticism: Painting before 1900' in Ulster Museum
The Renaissance to Romanticism exhibition draws together many of the Ulster Museum’s finest pre-1900 paintings. Since 2017, a series of major acquisitions have entered the museum's collections by gift, acceptance in lieu of tax, or grant-aided purchase. This display celebrates their arrival.
The first gallery gives an overview of European painting. This begins with a Renaissance Nativity by Baldassarre Peruzzi and the emergence, during the 1500s, of oil painting in Italy and Flanders (modern Belgium). This ground-breaking innovation gave artists greater freedom to experiment when depicting light and the natural world. During the 1600s, a revolutionary artistic movement took place in the Dutch Netherlands, where landscape painting, often revealing a heightened sensitivity to light and the atmospheric effects of weather, developed as an independent subject. During the 1700s, the art of ancient Greece and Rome became fashionable throughout Europe, encouraging artists and collectors to travel and study in Italy.
The second gallery charts the development of Irish landscape painting and highlights sitters and subjects connected with the north of Ireland. Family portraits dominate this room, illustrating some of the activities and ambitions associated with eighteenth-century childhood. Perhaps the most important painting in the Ulster Museum collection is J.M.W. Turner’s The Dawn of Christianity (The Flight into Egypt), 1841, a Romantic work that suggests an emotional response to nature. Turner’s depiction of light, sky and water anticipates Impressionism and creates a vital link to the post-1870 art in the collection.
