Every major art museum is famous for certain areas of its collections. The Art Institute of Chicago, for example, is famous for French Impressionist paintings, and apart from temporary shows and individual masterpieces in other departments, it’s Impressionism that attracts a great many of the museum’s visitors.
The institute has, however, more works that are in plain view but often are missed because their styles are less popular or they stand a little apart from the rest of the collection or they simply do not compete well with more dazzling pieces displayed with them.
My 1997 “best” list comes from this category. I’ve included some important works but more minor ones and curiosities the institute is not known for owning. The choices unfold in a sequence of rooms that begins with late Medieval art and proceeds chronologically toward Impressionism on the museum’s second floor.
German School: Self Portrait of a Young Artist (1490-1500). A diamond-hard painting typifying a strength later artists would feel was irrevocably lost to them (Gallery 207).
Sano di Pietro: Virgin and Child with Saints Jerome, Bernardino of Siena and Angels (1450-60). A devotional picture of infinite lyricism and tenderness (208).
Jan van Scorel: Landscape with Tournament and Hunters (1519-20). One of the earliest secular landscapes — teeming with vitality — by a Northern artist (209).
Luca Cambiaso: Venus and Cupid (c.1570). An allegory about the control of erotic desire conveyed with the intimacy of a whisper (211).
Peter Paul Rubens: The Capture of Samson (1609-10). A sketch with a dynamic brilliance far in excess of its small size (212).
Claude Lorrain: View of Delphi with a Procession (1673). The drama of a bull being led to sacrifice is subsumed in a panorama of exquisite natural serenity (213).
Eustache Le Sueur: Meekness (1650). A sublime decorative panel from an artist once ranked with the founder of French classical painting, Nicolas Poussin. (217A).
Henry Fuseli: Study for the First of Four Heads of Damned Souls from Dante (1778-80). (221). The Swiss forerunner of Romanticism takes on a subject well-suited to his fascination with the extravagant and horrific.
Constant Troyon: The Marsh (1840). A luscious, newly acquired landscape by one of the finest painters of animals in the 19th Century (222).
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Beata Beatrix (1871-72). English literary painting that compels attention even as it embarrasses with a combination of high-mindedness and eroticism (226).
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: The Fisherman’s Family (1887). Pale color and an atmosphere of rarified feeling suggest that poverty is a state of purity. (226).
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The extreme conditions that art can convey are unfortunately real for countless children, homeless people and others who are hungry or have a developmental disability. Art sometimes seems to ennoble such conditions, but that should not distance us from them. If anything, we need to become more engaged. Please make a generous contribution to the Chicago Tribune Holiday Fund; everything you give will go directly to charitable institutions. Contemplating human need in art can take us only so far.
