SANTA BARBARA, CALIF.- The Santa Barbara Museum of Art opened the exhibition, A Legacy of Giving: The Lady Leslie and Lord Paul Ridley-Tree Collection, on view July 7 – November 3, 2024.

For over 25 years, Lady Leslie and Lord Paul Ridley-Tree generously supported the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in its mission “to integrate art into the lives of people.” Leslie Ridley-Tree served on the Board of Trustees for 15 years, President of the Board of Trustees from 1994 to 1996, and became a Life Honorary Trustee in 2014. She led the Peck Wing renovation campaign committee in the early 1980s and was a lead contributor to the recent renovation, which culminated in 2021. She understood that the Museum had to connect with people and use art to open minds. To that end, she helped to make significant exhibitions possible, including Eternal China: Splendors from the First Dynasties (1998) and Botticelli, Titian, and Beyond: Masterpieces of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums (2015). To further this goal, she supported the refurbishment of a building on Arrellaga Street, renamed the Ridley-Tree Education Center at McCormick House, which now hosts art classes and camp programs. Finally, for over a quarter of a century, she and Paul donated outright or partially underwrote the acquisition of 58 artworks.

With the Ridley-Trees belief in the interlocking roles of art and education in mind, this exhibition takes 30 artworks from the 19th century that they donated and explores five themes relevant to the 21st century: environmentalism, expanding social roles for women, the need for artists to brand themselves, the role fantasy for picturing impossible worlds or times long ago, and how women artist managed carve out a career. The exhibition includes artworks by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Paul Signac, Claude Monet, Childe Hassam, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Pissarro, Henri Fantin-Latour, Eugène Boudin, Gustave Courbet, Charles François Daubigny, Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, Charles Émile Jacque, Francois Auguste Ortmans, and Théodore Rousseau.

Because A Legacy of Giving is really about a legacy of teaching, the following expands on the five themes of the exhibition. First, modern day environmental conservation had an early moment with the Barbizon artists, and tourists petitioned the French government to turn the Forests of Fontainebleau into a preserve and protect its varied hardwoods from being replaced by a single species of pine tree. Second, against the background of rapid industrialization with railroads, factories, and cities growing and expanding across France and Great Britain, artists often sought out vestiges of older—and soon-to-disappear—ways of life, either eliminating these modern incursions or putting them on the periphery. Third, this collection demonstrates how women like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot managed the difficult task of making careers for themselves by turning to the subjects of women, motherhood, domestic life, and children. Fourth, other artists, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Frederick Leighton, sought refuge in fantasies of medieval life or ancient Rome rather than confront the upheavals of their own times. Finally, there were commercial galleries regularly exhibiting and selling artwork, highly publicized exhibitions at annual salons and world’s fairs, and newspapers reporting on all of this to stir up interest in controversy.