Encompassing close to 2,000 objects, the Yale University Art Gallery’s collection of European art comprises paintings, sculpture, textiles, and a small but distinguished group of decorative arts, spanning the 9th through the 19th centuries.
The painting collection is panoramic in range, with particular strength in Italian art of the early Renaissance. Featuring one of the largest and finest groups of 13th- and 14th-century Tuscan paintings in the world, it also contains a significant number of 15th-century Sienese paintings and such acknowledged masterworks as Gentile da Fabriano’s Virgin and Child (ca. 1424–25), Antonio Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Deianira (ca. 1475–80), and Pontormo’s Madonna del Libro (ca. 1545–46).
The early Italian holdings are complemented by Northern Renaissance art, including Hieronymus Bosch’s Allegory of Intemperance (ca. 1495–1500) and Hans Holbein’s Hanseatic Merchant (1538), along with 17th-century Dutch landscapes and portraiture, highlighted by Frans Hals’s De Heer Bodolphe and Mevrouw Bodolphe and a select group of paintings and oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Nineteenth-century works include important paintings by Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme, strong groups of paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Vuillard, and Paul Cézanne, as well as Édouard Manet’s Young Woman Reclining in Spanish Costume (1862–63) and Vincent van Gogh’s seminal Night Café (1888).