WEST PALM BEACH, FL.- This re-installation of highlights from the Museum’s collection of early European art celebrates Ralph and Elizabeth Norton’s visionary acquisitions and gifts, and those from other donors, most notably the substantial donation in 2007 of Mrs. George T. (Valerie) Delacorte, and more recently of Damon Mezzacappa. Also on view are several spectacular works on loan from a private collection. Spanning 300 years, from the early 16th century Renaissance through the late 18th century Rococo periods, this gallery includes works by British, Dutch, French, Flemish, and Italian masters, including renowned artists Françoise Boucher, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Anthony van Dyke, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Joshua Reynolds, Peter Paul Rubens, and David Teniers.

Historically, Renaissance to Rococo encompasses artworks created during the reigns of the courts of the Medici in Florence, the Papacy in Rome, the Valois and Bourbon in France, the Habsburgs in Austria, Spain, and the Netherlands, and the Tudors and Stuarts in Britain. It was a time of absolutism, when the power of ruling monarchs and Popes was paramount. The rediscovery of Classical art in Rome by artists and scholars in the 15th century gave rise to the emergence of a pictorial and sculptural style devoted to mastering and implementing ancient principles of design, monumentality, and naturalism to create the illusion of three-dimensional space, such as in Joos van Cleve’s St. Jerome in his Study. In contrast, by the end of the 18th century, artists were praised and collected for their ingenuity with decorative artifice rather than veracity to the natural world, such as in Françoise Boucher’s An Allegory of Marriage.

Arranged thematically by genre, the “salon” hanging of this gallery (one painting above another), attempts to mimic a type of painting that became popular in 17th century Flanders (modern-day Belgium) called kunstkammer (art-rooms). Examples of such works – by Willem van Haecht and David Teniers – are on display. In this gallery, religious, historical, and mythological subjects are grouped together, while portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes are also arranged adjacent to one another, allowing the viewer to make comparisons over centuries and between styles and national and regional schools of art.