Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks

Featuring 39 masterpieces spanning five centuries, this exhibition draws from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection to explore the evolution of European and American landscape art.

Highlights include Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 17th‐century allegorical paintings of the five senses that invite visitors to consider their own experiences of the world. Venice, one of Allen’s favorite cities, is sumptuously represented in the exhibition through stunning Venetian scenes by Canaletto, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and J. M. W. Turner, among others. Other highlights include five Monet landscapes spanning 30 years, from views of the French countryside to his late immersive representations of water lilies, evocative works by Paul Cézanne and Gustav Klimt, and modern and contemporary perspectives by 20th‐century artists as diverse as Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha.

Credit: Exhibition Overview from the Phillips Collection website

Whether you go or not, the exhibition catalog, Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection, underscores that landscape is a subject of seemingly infinite variation and imaginative possibility. This Collection reveals a marked interest in innovative artists' reflections on the land and sea, including works that span more than 400 years, chronicling key developments in painting and art history. This book uses the Allen Family Collection to explore the evolution of landscape painting through the ages. The artists in the collection represent a who's who of masters of the landscape tradition. Thirty-nine paintings are featured, each accompanied by detailed essays that comprise a full discussion of the formal intellectual development of the landscape form.

Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection