The Met, GOMA and Art Exhibitions Australia bring European Masterpieces to Brisbane

New York’s The Met, GOMA and Art Exhibitions Australia have collaborated to bring European Masterpieces to Brisbane, and there’s an incredible story behind several paintings.

One of America’s wealthiest ever women, a feisty veteran of the Prison Special railway tour that campaigned for women’s rights, Louisine Havemeyer would smile if she could see the young visitors to the exhibition, European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.

Mrs Havemeyer died in 1929, leaving The Met a treasure trove of artworks and was passionate that young people should have every opportunity to visit museums.

“Yes, let them see the best pictures at the earliest possible age,” she wrote. “Youthful impressions are very vivid, and may have an important influence upon their lives.”

Among the 65 paintings in the GOMA exhibition, a collaboration between The Met, GOMA and Art Exhibitions Australia, are six gorgeous pictures that Mrs Havemeyer and her husband, sugar baron H.O. Havemeyer, collected with discernment and passion and gave to The Met.

Dancers, Pink and Green by Degas, part of the Havemeyer collection, can be seen at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art until October 17. Photography: Juan Trujillo

One is the extraordinary Veronese portrait, Boy with a greyhound, c.1570s, that Mrs Havemeyer initially dismissed when she discovered it covered in centuries of grime in a dilapidated Italian palazzo.

Seeing its silvery beauty today, unleashed by careful conservation, it’s hard to imagine this picture hung in obscurity for so long.

Another of Mrs Havemeyer’s pictures in the show, Daumier’s iconic The Third-Class Carriage, c. 1862-64, is a piece of social commentary that appears in school art history texts the world over.

Mrs Havemeyer knew Edgar Degas very well, and the artist’s lovely picture, Dancers, Pink and Green, c.1890, drew young ballerinas from the Queensland Ballet to visit the exhibition during rehearsal breaks.

The Havemeyers gave 17 Courbet paintings to The Met, and the exhibition in Brisbane includes one — The Young Bather, 1866.

Renoir’s By the Seashore, 1883, was bought by the Havemeyers bought it in 1889. It hangs in Brisbane, and some of GOMA’s medley of interactives, which visitors encounter within the exhibition, are based around its peaceful beauty.

Portrait of a Man, c.1475, by Hugo van der Goes, purchased by the Havemeyers in Paris in 1904, is the sixth and last of the couple’s paintings in the show. Other works in the exhibition (not collected by the Havemeyers) include those by Rembrandt, Rubens, Turner, Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh, to name a few.

Hugo van der Goes’ Portrait of a Man c.1475 will also feature in the exhibition. Picture: Supplied

Louisine Havemeyer, who left The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a treasure trove of artworks. Picture: Supplied

The Havemeyers lived on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 66th Street. Their home was demolished after their deaths and on the spot there is now an Art Deco apartment block boasting a 24-hour doorman, a maid service and in-house dog spa. Central Park is just across the road, and The Met is a few minutes walk away.

When Louisine lived on this spot, she allowed her grandchildren to play in rooms hung with dozens of masterpieces.

She was a leader of the suffragist movement, spending several nights in prison after a protest outside the White House and thus earning her position on the rousing Prison Special — a train that toured US cities where its occupants spoke out for women’s equality.

Joining Havemeyer in her political beliefs was American-born Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt, who guided her friend’s art buying to the extent that Havemeyer dubbed Cassatt the “godmother” of her collection.

When Havemeyer died in 1929, The Met said her bequest to it was “one of the most magnificent gifts of works of art ever made to a museum by a single individual”.

Her children afterwards donated vast riches of paintings, drawings, ceramics, armour, textiles and bronzes which the museum’s director said were sufficient to “furnish the museum in itself”.

In 1993, The Met held the exhibition, The Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection. Renoir’s By the Seashore, Degas’ Dancers, Pink and Green, and Veronese’s Boy with a Greyhound were all illustrated in the catalogue for the show.

ABC iview is screening the documentary Inside The Met. When the GOMA show closes on October 17, the paintings will return to New York where they will hang in newly refurbished European galleries — just up the road from where grandchildren once whooped around them in Mrs Havemeyer’s mansion.

European Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until October 17; $28 adult, $23 concession, $21 member, $10 ages 5-12, free for under fives, $66 family; qagoma.qld.gov.au

The author of this article travelled to Brisbane courtesy of Art Exhibitions Australia.