More than twenty-five paintings from the Yale Center for British Art are on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. This presentation offers visitors the opportunity to experience the YCBA’s collection in a new context while the museum is closed for a building conservation project.
The paintings represent the richness of British landscape and portrait art over four centuries, with works by Mary Beale, Richard Parkes Bonington, Thomas Lawrence, John Everett Millais, and J. M. W. Turner, among others. Interspersed throughout the second-floor European art galleries, the installation underscores the connections between Yale’s two art collections.
Works by painters represented in both collections are displayed together, providing visitors with a broader view of the artists’ oeuvres. George Stubbs’s Reapers (1795) is displayed near the Gallery’s own Stubbs painting, A lion attacking a horse (1770). Peter Paul Rubens’s Peace embracing plenty (1633–34) appears alongside several of his earlier works. Other paintings find resonance with works by their contemporaries. John Constable’s Hadleigh castle, the Mouth of the Thames—Morning after a stormy night (1829) and Stratford mill (1819–20) are juxtaposed with works from the Gallery’s collection by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Géricault, and Jean-François Millet, revealing the relationships between British and French landscape traditions.