Exhibitions

Endless rooms of 19th-century portraits might not sound like an immediately exciting prospect, even if they were the socialites, celebrities, and statesmen of their day. As soon as the name John Singer Sargent is mentioned, however, the exhibition is sure to be a blockbuster hit. The American painter’s widespread appeal has hardly been diminished since the days when the most fashionable members of society’s upper crust were vying to be immortalized by his brush.
Like an antidote to the avant-garde, Sargent’s paintings have a timeless charm owed to his uncanny ability to bring subjects to life on canvas. The latest survey of his work, “Sargent and Fashion,” has just opened at Tate Britain in London after a successful run at the MFA Boston. Walking through the galleries, one feels almost like they are stepping into a century-old conversation between fully sentient figures.
Faces full of character aside, Sargent’s subjects stand out for his richly resplendent renderings of their dress. Over the course of a lifetime, Sargent’s other interests inevitably shifted but his love of fashion and texture would remain a constant. Highlighting this pivotal part of his practice, the exhibition reunites the portraits with the original clothes worn or, in some cases, items of a similar type. Examples include the bright yellow dress donned by Spanish dancer La Carmencita and the magnificent black opera cloak worn by Lady Sassoon.
Installation view of “Sargent and Fashion” at Tate Britain showing La Carmencita (c. 1890). Photo: Larina Fernandes, © Tate.
“One thing that is striking to anyone that looks at his work is just how much he’s interested in the clothes,” said the show’s curator James Finch. “He’s evidently in love with the textures of clothing. The exhibition allows viewers to see what Sargent is doing in the process of painting: the details that he picks out, the things that he elides, and the process of transformation that is taking place.”
Though some critics have struggled to understand the crucial role that fashion plays in constructing identity, its significance was obvious to Sargent and many of his sitters. It is well known that he kept a repertoire of props for this purpose and made careful but often surprising adjustments to each sitter’s costume as he saw fit.
“We have enough evidence to give a clear sense that Sargent was very interventionist,” said Finch. “There was a class of patron who sought out this unexpected quality in the portrait and who left themselves open to working with an artist who would push back. If you knew exactly how you wanted to be depicted, you probably wouldn’t go to Sargent.”
“He wasn’t an artist that relied on preparatory drawings,” Finch added, “but really worked his ideas out on the canvas. He never really smoothed out those edges even when he was extremely in demand. Every portrait was still an experiment on some level.”
Artnet News asked Finch to pick out five portraits from the exhibition that exemplify Sargent’s meticulous fashioning of identity through dress.

Lady Helen Vincent
John Singer Sargent, Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess d’Abernon (1904). Photo: Sean Pathasema, courtesy of Birmingham Museum of Art.
Sargent’s tendency to toy around with the details is apparent in his portrait of Lady Helen Vincent, a diarist and celebrated socialite who also worked as a nurse anaesthetist during World War I. Sargent painted her while she was staying in Venice just a few years before he would swear off portraits in 1907. Though Lady Helen was in fact wearing a white dress during their sessions, Sargent decided to change the color to black halfway through to produce a more immediately striking effect. Reflecting on this last minute swap, Sargent quipped that he was both a “painter and a dressmaker.”
“He would tailor what the sitter was wearing and make it look quite different,” said Finch. “Rather than simply documenting the latest styles he found a way to make them conform to his vision.”

Ellen Terry
Installation view of “Sargent and Fashion” at Tate Britain showing Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (c. 1889). Photo: Larina Fernandes, © Tate.
When Sargent attended the opening night of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre in London in 1888, he was immediately moved to paint the actress Ellen Terry in the starring role of Lady Macbeth. She stood out on stage for her spectacular dress that was adorned with gold thread and 1,000 iridescent wings plucked from the green jewel beetle. When Terry described the dress to her daughter, she lamented that “the photographs give no idea of it at all, for it is in color that is so splendid.”
Luckily, Sargent wasted no time in asking to paint Terry. He had originally picked a pose that directly quoted the play but ended up having the star raise her arms over her head instead.
“The pose is devised to showcase the dress so that you really get a sense of how the sleeves and cloak fall in a very dramatic way,” said Finch. “Its a really extravagant outfit that shows the outsized personality of the performer.”
Surprisingly, Sargent also chose to make the dress more blue than it appears in real life on the advice of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.

Samuel Jean Pozzi
John Singer Sargent, Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881). Photo: The Armand Hammer Collection.
The French surgeon Samuel Jean Pozzi was a glamorous man about town who befriended notable cultural figures like Marcel Proust and Sarah Bernhardt, and had numerous affairs, including with Virginie Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most notorious Portrait of Madame X (1884).
Pozzi’s more dapper side comes across in a black-and-white photo from the time, but Sargent made the bold choice to reimagine him in a totally different guise. Striking an elegant pose, Pozzi is shown wearing a statement red dressing gown and Turkish slippers in a disarmingly intimate domestic space.
“Its an almost transgressive way of depicting him that says so much about subverting ideas of masculinity at that time,” said Finch.

Lady Hammersley
John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (1892). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Douglass Campbell, in memory of Mrs. Richard E. Danielson, 1998.
The London hostess Mrs. Hammersley stands out against a decadent gold background for her cherry pink velvet gown. We know just how faithfully Sargent reproduced the color thanks to the swatch that Hammersley kept, which has since entered the the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection along with the painting.
“She clearly had such a strong sense of what it meant to sit for Sargent,” said Finch. “She was very interested in the arts and had a salon that was attended by Sargent, Walter Sickert, Augustus John, and other artists. She kept all her correspondence with Sargent and clearly had a sense of herself as her own archivist.”
The painting caused a stir when it was exhibited in 1893, with critics expressing discomfort at its ostentatious emphasis on dress. George Moore described the work as “the apotheosis of fashionable painting,” that would have as short a lifespan as any other trend. One day, he concluded, “many will turn with a shudder from its cold, material accomplishment.” Needless to say, it remains a widely admired portrait.

Eleanor O’Donnell Iselin
John Singer Sargent, Eleanora O’Donnell Iselin (Mrs. Adrian Iselin) (1888). Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington.
When Eleanor O’Donnell Iselin first sat for Sargent, she must have known that he preferred an interventionist approach because she brought an array of exquisite dresses from Paris for him to choose from. Ever unpredictable, Sargent was immediately taken instead by the simple black day dress she had arrived in. According to at least one account, Iselin was disappointed by the artist’s choice, but we can only assume that he saw in the more austere outfit a fitting tribute to Iselin’s reportedly serious character.
“Its perhaps not what Iselin would have had in mind when she was first commissioning Sargent,” said Finch, but as always, “it would be a process of negotiation to reach the final outcome.”
“Sargent and Fashion” is on view at Tate Britain in London until July 7, 2024. 
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The latest display at Liverpool’s Beatles Museum is the unlikely result of a 55-year-long saga involving John Lennon and Yoko Ono, an aborted peace monument, a drunk driver, and a retired traffic cop who does not care for the Beatles.
The musical duo planted the acorns at Coventry Cathedral in 1968, intending for them to be part of a living sculpture, with a wrought iron bench surrounding the two trees. But in less than a week’s time, the acorns had been dug up and stolen, and a discouraged Lennon gave up on the gesture and removed the bench. 
It turns out that a few days after the theft, a young man was busted for drunk driving nearby, and Mike Davies, a traffic sergeant with the Warwickshire Police, retrieved the acorns from him. The offender and his girlfriend, who were in fact Beatles fans, had dug up the acorns and coated them in clear nail varnish in order to preserve them. 
“They walked and the acorns were left,” Davies, now 88, told the PA news agency, explaining that the acorns were, legally speaking, worthless and had no owner, so he didn’t bring charges. “It was no good taking them back and replanting them because they were covered in nail varnish so wouldn’t grow.”
Davies simply kept the acorns in his desk until his retirement in 1980, at which time he brought them home in a cardboard box with other personal effects. He had forgotten all about them until he came across them last year.
“They were two seconds off going in the waste bin when I thought, ‘That was John Lennon and Yoko Ono,’” he said.
So, Davies sent them to the Liverpool museum, saying that if they weren’t interested in adding them to the collection, they should just throw them out, as he didn’t care to have them back. 
The two acorns that John Lennon and Yoko Ono planted at Coventry Cathederal and were then dug up and stolen, now on display at the Beatles Museum in Matthew Street, Liverpool. Photo by Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images.
The acorns have now gone on display at the museum after an unveiling by Lennon’s sister, Julia Baird. 
“John Lennon and Yoko Ono kicked off their whole peace movement with this art installation, where the acorns were planted,” said Roag Best, museum owner and brother to original Beatles drummer Pete Best. 
Lennon and Ono’s quest for world peace, which came at the peak of the counterculture movement, was well known, including “bed-ins,” one from their suite at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel and another from the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, and their slogan “War is over! If you want it.” At the Montreal bed-in, they wrote the song “Give Peace a Chance,” which as recorded as a Plastic Ono Band single in 1969 and became an international hit.
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The Colossus of Constantine has returned to Rome, recreated from existing fragments with the help of latest 3D scanning and modeling technologies. Produced by the Madrid-based digital preservation nonprofit Factum Foundation, the statue was first exhibited at Fondazione Prada’s 2022 exhibition “Recycling Beauty.” Early this month, the 42-feet-tall, 1:1 facsimile of the Colossus arrived in Rome, and will remain in the garden of Villa Caffarelli of Musei Capitolini at least until 2025.
It is believed that the original Colossus, commissioned by the emperor Constantine and produced between 313 and 315 C.E. was itself a “remake,” adapting a pre-existing pagan statue. Placed in the Basilica of Maxentius, it commemorated the rule of emperor Constantine, marking his and the Roman Empire’s conversion from paganism to Christianity. This was also where the marble fragments used in the recreation of the Colossus were discovered in the 15th century, now on view at the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome. Missing parts of the monumental seated figure are thought to have been pillaged for bronze sometime in the late Antiquity.
The surviving portions of the statue of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great on view in a courtyard of the Capitoline Museums. Photo: Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
Fragments from Rome and one chest fragment from the Parco Archeologico del Colosseo were scanned using photogrammetry and a LiDAR scanner, technologies increasingly popular in heritage preservation and conservation. Missing parts of the statue were modeled by 3D sculptor Irene Gaumé in consultation with experts and curators at the Musei Capitolini and with reference to coeval statues from Ara Pacis Museum, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and the Museo Nazionale Romano.
In place of the original white marble and bronze clad onto a brick and wood structure, the facsimile features contemporary materials and techniques. 3D printing, reinforced resin, polyurethane, marble dust, aluminum, gold leaf, and plaster were combined to produce a durable facsimile that closely imitates original materials, Factum Foundation reported in an extensive write-up.
Detail of replica of the statue Roman Emperor Constantine that was rebuilt using 3D technology. Photo: Stefano Costantino/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
Digitally reconstructed parts of the statue were visually distinguished from facsimiles made from scanned fragments. “We’re not trying to build a fake object,” the founder of Factum Foundation Adam Lowe told the New York Times. “We’re trying to build something that physically and emotionally engages and that intellectually stimulates you.”
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Upcoming at the Louvre in Paris, a major exhibition is set to showcase the works of Jan van Eyck (1390-1441), the Flemish master of the Northern Renaissance, from March 20 to June 17, 2024. Titled “Meeting with a Masterpiece: The Virgin by Chancellor Rolin” the exhibition promises to present the largest collection of Van Eyck’s works ever seen in France.
The artist’s influence on European art cannot be overstated. His mastery of oil painting techniques changed the course of western art history, bringing a newfound realism and luminosity to his works. Through his method of glazing, which involved applying multiple translucent layers of oil paint, Van Eyck achieved depth, richness of colour, and intricate light and shadow effects. His meticulous attention to detail breathed life into his compositions, from the textures of fabrics to the landscapes in the background.
Van Eyck received commissions to paint significant portraits, including Isabella of Portugal. One of his most famed works, The Arnolfini Portrait, painted in 1434, depicts Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife in their home. The work has various interpretations and mysteries, including a cryptic figure within the convex mirror’s reflection.
Jan Van Eyck, The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin (ca. 1435) before restoration. Musée du Louvre, dist RMT – Grand Palais, Angèle Dequier.
At the heart of the exhibition in Paris lies the restored version of The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin, completed around 1435. After undergoing historic restoration, the painting had centuries-old oxidised varnish removed to reveal the painted layers that lie beneath. Alongside this piece, the exhibition will feature six other masterpieces by Van Eyck, including The Lucca Madonna (ca. 1437) from the Städel Museum. This rare exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to explore Van Eyck’s evolution as an artist and his interactions with contemporaries like Rogier van der Weyden and Robert Campin.
A program of events will accompany the exhibition, with a series of lectures on the restoration process, musical performances inspired by Van Eyck’s works, and opportunities to engage with art experts. If Alastair Sooke’s review of the “Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution” exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent in 2020 is anything to go by, we are eagerly anticipating the upcoming show in Paris.
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It is reasonable to expect that we may not remember the noughties with absolute clarity. We stumbled towards that historical horizon with a fin-de-siècle perversity made all the more dire by the rising superstitions of millennial dread. And then, with an offbeat chronological clockwork that belied the frenzy of Y2K, we hit the new century with a traumatic bang 20 months later, on September 11, 2001. 
It all comes back to us when we listen to decade-defining greatest hits compilations heavy on Eminen, Coldplay, Pink, Linkin Park, Black Eyed Peas, and Britney Spears. Lets not forget the memes that remind us of the advent of social media. Isn’t the very nature of cultural memory defined by the fact that first-hand experience is never so comprehensible as when it is relived through nostalgia? When I was growing up, the joke was that if you could remember the sixties you weren’t there, but this seems to be a rule of thumb for every era. Actually living it is incidental and anecdotal to the fictions of recollection.
The promise of a new century is something between an extreme diet and a healthy amnesia. We can finally shed all those named decades and the burden of their associations to start anew with a clean slate. The expectation should be that it is shiny, young, and fresh, rather than dusty, old, and dull. We want novelty and, above all else, youth, so that’s what we’re celebrating here, the exhibitions from 2000 to 2010, which put youth culture and its unruly vernaculars above mid-career surveys and historical retrospectives.
Also, please note that to avoid the gratuitous hierarchy of listicles, this is an index of certain shows as they occurred chronologically rather than by degree of importance.
“Sensation” at the Brooklyn Museum, NY (2000) 
Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum of Art look at artist Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, part of the “Sensation” exhibition (1999). Photo: Doug Kanter/AFP via Getty Images
The best way to dive into the arbitrary framework of divvying up history according to the numbers of a Gregorian calendar is to cheat, so we’re starting with a show that was really a late ’90s exhibition in London because, well, it did run in New York through January 2000.
Like a grand debutante ball for a generation of YBAs (Young British Artists), this was a coming out like few others, the zeitgeist as organized and packaged by an English ad man. Of course it mattered that so many of its artists (including the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Rachel Whiteread) were brilliant, but it sure helped that they were as ambitious and crafty as the exhibition’s capitalist maestro, Charles Saatchi.
Somehow pulling off all the experimental, radical, and subversive genius of late 20th-century American art with impeccable English style, it felt like Brian Epstein and Malcolm McLaren had gotten together to launch another British Invasion, something we might have resented if it hadn’t been so damn smart and sexy.
Scandal and outrage—with a healthy dash of culture wars rhetoric—were a big part of the heady brew, as England got all Fleet Street over Marcus Harvey’s monumental portrait of serial killer Myra Hindley, and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani got his knickers in knots over Chris Ofili’s use of elephant dung in his representation of the Virgin Mary. He decried that “the city shouldn’t have to pay for this sick stuff,” before trying to pull the Brooklyn Museum’s funding and evict them from their century-old home. Funny how the media now frames Giuliani’s despicable behavior, pathological lies, and psychotic furies like some amazing fall from grace. Most New Yorkers have known he’s a deranged asshole for a long time.

“Beautiful Losers” at Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (2004) 
Installation view, “Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art, Skateboarding and Street Culture” at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Photo: Tony Walsh (2004). Image courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH.
The first and still unmatched exhibition to chart the visual artists deeply associated with the subcultures of skateboarding, graffiti, punk, and hip hop, “Beautiful Losers” succeeded like none before, because it understood these are not opposing camps but realms of mutual influence and dynamic cross-pollination.
Taking its name from a 1966 novel by Leonard Cohen, and grounded with a pantheon of forbearers including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Clark, Robert Crumb, Futura, Keith Haring, Raymond Pettibon, Pushead, C.R. Stecyk III, and Andy Warhol, “Beautiful Losers” helped launch and conceptualize a generation of artists who had fans long before they had collectors. Among them were Mark Gonzales, Kaws, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Ryan McGinley, and so many others that are now simply legendary.
Born of alternate media sensibilities like zines, album covers, skateboard graphics, sketchbooks, and music videos, the cumulative effect was D.I.Y. multimedia, a tribal narrative of underground sensibilities so compelling one of the curators, Aaron Rose, made the show into a movie, and four of the artists—Harmony Korine, Mike Mills, Cheryl Dunn and Spike Jonze—would become far more celebrated as filmmakers.

“Ecstasy: In and About Altered States” at MOCA, Los Angeles (2005) 
Installation view of Ecstasy: In and About Altered States, October 9, 2005 – February 20, 2006 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photo by Brian Forrest.
When it comes to understanding culture, there is the question of how much contemporary creativity is about the fine art of intoxication. Does art look the way it does, or music sound a particular way, because artists get high? And do we seek out these expressions because we like feeling that way too?
A sensory gift from curator Paul Schimmel back when he had his MOCA mojo, “Ecstasy” was a universe of out of this world. This was eye-candy with selfie-magnets for communal ego deaths, like Carsten Holler’s “Upside Down Mushroom Room”, and a cast of blue chip art stars tripping the light fantastic. It was like the coolest chill out room in the most aesthetic rave, a full blast of mind-melting mayhem at a visionary velocity that would make Bernini dance in his grave. 

“Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture” at Japan Society, NYC (2005) 
Installation shot, “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture”. Yuji Sakai, godzilla figures, various scales and dates.Photo: Sheldan Collins. Courtesy the Japan Society.
The brilliant finale to Takeshi Murakami’s trilogy of shows on Japanese popular culture that began with “Superflat” in 2000, “Little Boy”—named after the type of atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima—explored the gleeful infantilism of post-war Japanese art from the dark perspective of national trauma. Dizzying, delirious, and entertaining in ways that most fine art would never dare to be, “Little Boy” spun an alternative storyline, as conceptually acute as it was visually compelling. It spanned the legacy of Manga comics and Anime cartoons, the fetish of Godzilla toy figures, the rise of Otaku fan culture, the post-modern perversity of Kawaii’s super-cute, and the explosion of a hyperactive pop culture, as the frantic expressions of the psychic rupture wrought by the atomic age.
A stunning example of just how wildly inventive language gets when lost in translation, Japan’s embrace of western entertainment’s spectacle would indeed forever change our own amusements and obsessions. By looking back Murakami was prescient beyond measure, delivering an art house prequel to Barbenheimer with subversive subtitles.  

“Spank the Monkey” at the Baltic Art Centre, Gateshead, UK (2006) 
Installation view of work by Barry Mcgee in “Spank the Monkey” exhibition at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, (2006-7). Photo Colin Davison © the artist. Courtesy Baltic.
Probably the most important show no one has heard of, “Spank the Monkey” saw curator Pedro Alonzo catch the big wave of urban art long before it crested into an international phenomenon. He brought a wide range of practices into an unlikely but lively dialog, including those of Banksy, Dr Lakra, FAILE, Shepard Fairey, Invader, Barry McGee, Ryan McGinness, Os Gemeos, David Shrigley, Swoon and Ed Templeton. Sadly the museum—mistaking youth culture with juvenile humor—chose to name the show after the act of masturbation, so instead of heading these artists’ bios, it was dropped by all to spare cringe embarrassment.  

“The Generational Triennial: Younger than Jesus” at the New Museum, NYC (2009) 
Installation view of “The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus,” New Museum, New York (2009). Photo: Allison Brady
Billed as “The Generational” triennial, “Younger than Jesus” seemed so bold out the gate, limiting itself to artists under 33 years old, and making too evident how the art world’s vampire thirst for new blood lays in some shady ground between Peter Pan and pedophilia.
With a trio of sharp curators, Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman, which was somehow abetted by an open source network of 150 arts professionals the world over, this gathering of Gen Y Millennials (the kids of Baby Boomers, for those keeping track) was about as tepid as one might expect of consensus opinion, showcasing the process of collective ratification and ambitious professionalism more than the slippery moves of delinquent kids who ultimately do more to change the world than their disappointed parents will ever know.
Though the energy flagged as it inevitably does when adult squares try to dress up like cool kids, the endeavor was too savvy to fail, with some killer work by Cory Arcangel, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Josh Smith, Ryan Trecartin, and Adam Pendleton, back when they were fresh.

Wynwood Walls in Miami (2009) 
Wynwood Walls with Peter Tunney at Wynwood Walls on December 10, 2017 in Miami, featuring mural by Kenny Scharf. Photo: Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
For all the elite, rich power players in the art world, really visionary patrons like Tony Goldman don’t come along all that often. Starting out in the 1960s with his brother, renovating apartments on the Upper West Side, Tony fell in love with a neglected no-man’s land downtown called Soho, working as much as an historian preserving the flat-iron architecture as a developer, and learning that neighborhoods ultimately depend on culture and community far more than the wealthy cats who take them over.
He did the same for the art deco district of Miami Beach, and for his final act brought us to the nightmarish gentrification party zone we now know as the Wynwood district. For all his kindness in life, capitalist success will always leave a mixed legacy, and the once generous and freewheeling outdoor museum Goldman created is now a tourist clip joint with all the curatorial adventure of a marketing company, seeing which artists have the most likes on social media. But if you were lucky enough to be there when Tony opened it at the end of the decade with major murals by Futura, Os Gemeos, Kenny Scharf, Barry McGee, and Shepard Fairey, you will never forget the magic that can happen when the city dreams for all to see. 

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Sir Frederic Leighton’s iconic painting Flaming June (1895) back at the Royal Academy, on loan from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. First exhibited at the RA almost 128 years ago at the height of Leighton’s popularity, the painting enjoyed great success with Victorian audiences and critics, and is today considered one of the artist’s best-known and most reproduced works.
Flaming June portrays a sleeping woman, curled up beneath an awning and draped in a translucent orange Grecian dress, the circular shape taken by her body thought to symbolize the sun. In the background, the setting sun lights up the still surface of the sea, while a blooming Oleander flower suggests the scene is set in the early summer. The relative lack of iconographic detail or narrative, and the artist’s focus on color and form has led critics to associate the painting with Aestheticism. Painted a year before the artist’s death, Flaming June was well-received by its contemporaries, but the painting’s fortunes would soon change.
Shortly after the painting was made, it disappeared for decades, until it was by chance rediscovered in the 1960s, found boxed in over a chimney in a home in Battersea, England. In all that time, Victorian art had fallen out of fashion, and no one seemed to want to buy it.
The canvas was eventually bought for Museo de Arte de Ponce by its founder, Puerto Rican politician, industrialist, and patron of the arts Luis A. Ferré in 1963. Ferré bought the painting against the opinion of his advisors, and for a mere £2,000. The meager price demonstrated the changing feeling towards academic figurative painting at a time when Impressionism, post-Impressionism and abstraction reigned supreme in the museums and the art market. As tastes changed and interest in art of the Victorian era returned, Flaming June regained its status as one of the best-loved works of this period in British art. In recent years, Flaming June has been loaned to a number of museums while Museo de Arte de Ponce reconstructs its exhibition spaces damaged in the catastrophic 2020 earthquakes in Puerto Rico.
Flaming June will be on view at the Royal Academy from February 17th 2024 until January 12th 2025, having previously been loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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