Exhibition - The Sense of Beauty: Six Centuries of Painting From Museo De Arte De Ponce

About the Event

Former governor of Puerto Rico Luis A. Ferré (1904–2003) was an industrialist, an engineer, a musician, and an ardent aficionado of art. Much like the Meadows Museum’s founder, Algur H. Meadows, Ferré was inspired to collect art during a transformative trip to Spain in the 1950s, where he began purchasing contemporary copies of paintings by Spanish old masters like Murillo and El Greco. However, Ferré soon longed for the “spark of life” of original works of art, and so he embarked on a lifelong mission to amass a collection of genuine masterpieces.

Over the next decade Ferré acquired about two hundred works, focusing on seventeenth- and nineteenth-century painting in particular. To house his collection, he founded the Museo de Arte de Ponce (MAP) in 1959, now one of the Caribbean’s leading cultural institutions. Ferré’s eclectic taste is evident in Museo de Arte de Ponce’s collection, which spans from the Italian Renaissance to contemporary Puerto Rican artists.

In the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes that rocked the island in January 2020 and forced the museum’s closure of its signature 1965 building by Edward Durell Stone for repairs, Museo de Arte de Ponce has seized the opportunity to allow selected works from its collection to travel the globe and bring it wider exposure. The largest of these exhibitions, The Sense of Beauty: Six Centuries of Painting from Museo de Arte de Ponce, debuts at the Meadows on February 23, 2025, kicking off a multicity tour across the United States. More than sixty works dating from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first will be on view, reflecting the extraordinary scope and diversity of Museo de Arte de Ponce’s collection.

The Sense of Beauty will feature masterworks by the leading lights of European and American painting. The exhibition gathers religious and historical pictures by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Angelica Kauffmann; portraits by Joshua Reynolds and Elisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun; landscapes by Claude Lorrain and Gustave Courbet; and genre scenes by Jean-Léon Gérôme and William-Adolphe Bouguereau. In a presentation unique to the Dallas venue, the Spanish selections—including works by El Greco, Jusepe de Ribera, Francisco de Goya, Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, and Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida-will be displayed among the Meadows’ permanent collection, further enhancing the rich narrative of Spanish art history that the Meadows presents. Two polychromed wood sculptures by the seventeenth-century Spanish artists Pedro de Mena and José de Mora will travel exclusively to the Meadows.

Museo de Arte de Ponce is especially renowned for having the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art outside of the UK. The iconic painting Flaming June by Frederic Leighton will be a major highlight, joining works by two other members of the brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. Dazzling landscapes by George Inness, Frederic Edwin Church, and William Merritt Chase will demonstrate the sublime power of nineteenth-century American painting. The exhibition will also emphasize the legacy of Puerto Rican art, from José Campeche’s devotional images of the late eighteenth century to the work of contemporary artists such as Myrna Báez, Francisco Rodón, and María de Mater O’Neill.

The Meadows is thrilled to welcome this exceptional collection to Texas, and to celebrate Luis Ferré’s commitment to the transformative potential of beauty and his belief in art as a universal language.

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