Director’s Letter

We begin the New Year by sending our warmest wishes for the well-being of all our supporters in uncertain times. We emphatically see 2026 as a vibrant year for the museum, as we complete the transformation of our downtown space into an elegant gallery, welcome a splendid addition to the collection, and continue to share our art with international partners. Andrea Steele Architecture, known especially for its award-winning cultural projects, has designed a visitor-friendly transformation of the museum’s office and shop into an exhibition space that will begin construction this spring, allowing us to once again visually present the history of 19^th-century academic art that will include the new acquisition of the remarkable Elizabeth V. and Norbert R. Wirsching Collection of Orientalist Art, adding strength and further diversity to the museum’s already renowned survey of European Orientalist art. We’ll share more information on the new facility and the Wirsching Collection in the near future, so stay tuned.

For the present, a current exhibition in Vienna includes three important loans from this museum. Dealing in Splendor: A History of the European Art Market, at the Liechtenstein Princely Collections Garden Palace from January 30 to April 6, offers a survey of this most interesting phenomenon from 1500 to 1900 by a distinguished team of eminent scholars and curators. The subject has engaged the Dahesh Museum in its own exhibitions and publications for many years, most notably in 2000 with Gérôme & Goupil:  Art and Enterprise, co-organized with the Musée Goupil, Bordeaux, and the Frick Art & Historical Center Pittsburgh, celebrating the artist and his publisher father-in-law, Adolphe Goupil, for their importance in the art world of the 19^th century. For the current exhibition in Vienna we are lending star paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Working in Marble or The Artist Sculpting Tanagra, 1890, and The Birth of Venus by Adolphe Jourdan and Alexandre Cabanel, ca. 1864. Goupil & Cie commissioned Jourdan’s copy after Cabanel’s sensational painting The Birth of Venus, creating a wealth of printed replicas in diverse formats and price ranges — something for everyone. The exhibition also includes the Dahesh Museum’s beautiful Grazing Sheep in the Pyrenees by Rosa Bonheur, whose art was widely promoted and traveled by the influential dealer Ernest Gambart – a Belgian but truly international. Goupil and Gambart were two of the art world’s transformative figures during the American Gilded Age.

I’m also delighted to write of another very exciting international exhibition opening November 4, 2026, that will feature one of our most impressive history paintings, possibly accompanied by a fortuitous recent acquisition, both by the Czech artist, Jaroslav Čermàk. We were pleased to respond to a request from the National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic, for the loan of Čermàk’s formidable Abduction of a Herzegovinian Woman, acquired in 2000. And we were able to inform them that we had recently acquired a second painting by Čermàk, which – as I write this – is under consideration for inclusion by the exhibition’s organizers. This is the first international celebration of a significant Central European artist, whose paintings document the history of his natal region. Abduction’s subject is a horrific scene recreating the destruction of Christian settlements by Ottoman mercenaries, a conflict that the artist could have witnessed. His 1861 Paris Salon medal-winning composition was timely, authentically terrifying, and pictorially based, in true academic practice, on classic precedents by Giambologna and Bernini. (See discussion in the painting’s Search the Collection entry.) It further documents Gilded Age collecting, as its provenance begins with its acquisition by the above cited Adolphe Goupil directly from the artist and eventually to ownership by the New York collector Theodore A. Havemeyer.

Čermàk began his studies at the Prague Academy, and the Dahesh Museum’s recent acquisition is an exquisite small canvas inscribed with his monogram and on the verso the date 1848 and the location “Prag.” Comparison with contemporary likenesses identifies the subject as composer Robert Schumann. In 1849 Čermàk left Prague and enrolled at the Royal Academy in Antwerp, Belgium, led by renowned history painter Gustaav Wappers. In 1850 he departed for Paris and a successful European career, including the Order of Leopold, presented by the king of Belgium. His Antwerp time is documented in a painting I identified in the collection of the academy’s student efforts and discussed in this museum’s May 2018 Newsletter. We informed the exhibition curators of the Antwerp Academy painting and our recent acquisition, both considered for the exhibition and adding information to his early artistic development.
 

 

He soon made his debut appearance in the Paris Salon in 1853 with Viellesse de Lomnicky-z-Bedce, set in Prague, which stylistically retains the influence of his Belgian training. He traveled widely in Bohemia,

Slovakia, and Dalmatia, employing these locations for subject matter. In his last decade he spent time in Brittany, painting the coast. He regularly exhibited in Paris and in other European locations, including Belgium. The Prague exhibition will introduce his work to a broader audience and demonstrate the international nature of the art academy in the 19^th century.

 

 

 

 

David Farmer
Director of Exhibitions