The Spirit of the Place: Selections from the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection

An exhibition of fourteen paintings and four sculptures from the collection of Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza. French, Italian, British, German, Spanish, and American artists were represented in works that ranged from scenes by the Italian vedutisti of the eighteenth-century to masterpieces by French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. This small ensemble suggested some of the main features of the Baroness' collection as a whole — a preference for landscape and genre paintings and loosely-painted picture surfaces —which link works of different periods and national schools. Each of the works on display also revealed a painterly sensitivity to the genius loci, or spirit of a place.