Botticelli to Braque: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland

“Botticelli to Braque: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland“ brought 55 paintings from the three institutions that form the National Galleries of Scotland (the Scottish National Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) to the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park from 7 March to 3 May 2015. The selection spanned more than four centuries of European painting, from Sandro Botticelli’s The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child (c. 1485) to Georges Braque’s Cubist Candlestick (1911), and had been assembled to present the breadth and depth of the Edinburgh collections to American audiences.

The exhibition had opened in a smaller form at the Frick Collection in New York in November 2014 under the title “Masterpieces from the Scottish National Gallery,“ featuring ten works from Edinburgh. For the de Young and subsequent Kimbell Art Museum presentations, forty-five additional paintings joined those ten, forming the full 55-work travelling show. The roster spanned Renaissance masters Titian and Veronese; seventeenth-century painters including El Greco, Velázquez, Van Dyck, Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer; nineteenth-century figures such as Pissarro, Degas, Monet, Sargent, Gauguin, and Cézanne; and modern artists including Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, and Braque. Scottish portraitists Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn were also prominently represented.

Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (c. 1654–1656), the largest painting he is known to have made and the only surviving work from his earliest career period, travelled from the Scottish National Gallery as one of the anchor loans in the exhibition. The painting, which entered the Scottish National Gallery in 1927, is among the most exceptional works in the Edinburgh collection and rarely travels. The touring exhibition was partly organised to generate funds for the National Galleries of Scotland’s capital refurbishment programme, making the international exposure of holdings like the Vermeer particularly significant for the institution.