European and American Art

European and American Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Art

The Gallery has acquired European art from the outset, but the collection was built with intention from the 1910s, with a goal of representing the continent’s rich and diverse traditions. Thomas Gainsborough’s Ignatius Sancho was the first Old Master bought for the nation; this portrait of a musician and man of letters is also a testament to the Gallery’s long-standing interest in British art. At the same time, the Gallery was also purchasing contemporary pieces, such as Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: The Sun in a Fog. Today, the collection encompasses some 2,000 works from the Renaissance through to the 20th century. Painting and sculpture form its core, rounded out by film, video and installation art, and complemented by a small group of decorative art.

The largest number of works comes from Britain, France and Italy, but important and characteristic pieces by Dutch, Flemish, German and Spanish artists, among others, are also on view. Aside from a representative group of works from the early Renaissance, this material dates from the 16th century onwards. In the 1970s, the Gallery began to develop its collection of American art, which is strongest in post-1945 painting and sculpture, particularly Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.

Curators and conservators work together to study and preserve the collection, and new discoveries are made and published regularly. By organizing exhibitions around these artworks, we are able to enrich visitors’ experience and better understand these complex objects. We are also committed to examining the provenance of the works in our care, particularly those which may have changed hands between 1933 and 1945. To learn more, please visit our Provenance Research Project.

The Gallery continues to actively seek out works of art to add to the national collection. Recent acquisitions include Alessandro Vittoria’s bust of Giulio Contarini (c. 1570–1576); Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of Countess Tolstaya (1796), a major gift from a Canadian collector; Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s Love Seduces Innocence, Pleasure Entraps, and Remorse Follows (1809); Gustave Doré’s Souvenir of Loch Lomond (1875); Jules Dalou’s sculpture A Young Woman from Boulogne Feeding her Child (1876); and Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Sunshine in the Drawing Room (1910).

The department of European and American Art has issued many publications. The catalogue for the exhibition Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, co-produced by the Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, won the 2016 Foreword INDIES gold award for Women’s Studies.

Collection Highlights

Curatorial Team

Christopher Etheridge, Associate Curator, European and American Art

Christopher Etheridge studied History of Art at the University of Toronto and Harvard University, where he received his doctorate. He is responsible for the Gallery’s collection of painting, sculpture and decorative art from the Renaissance through to the first part of the 19th century. By bringing together technical art history – the study of artists’ materials and practices – and traditional art history, he hopes to better understand the full significance of these complex objects. He was co-curator of the dossier exhibition Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens, a re-examination of the Gallery’s holdings of 17th-century Flemish art.

Anabelle Kienle Poňka, Interim Senior Curator of European Art

Born in Germany, Dr. Anabelle Kienle Poňka studied art history, cultural studies and sociology in Münster, Germany, and Vienna, Austria. She joined the department of European and American art in 2006 overseeing the National Gallery’s collection of painting, sculpture and decorative art from 1820–1991. Previously, Kienle Poňka held positions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, where she conducted research into its renowned German Expressionist collection and spearheaded the museum’s Nazi-era provenance research project. In 2008, she published a book on German artist Max Beckmann’s American years. Recent exhibition projects have included Monet: A Bridge to Modernity (2015) and Van Gogh: Up Close (2012), which she co-curated.

Renovating the Baroque Room

Over the course of two months, our team gave a fresh and more modern look to our Baroque Room in the European Galleries. Learn more in this video.

Loan: Gustav Klimt

Hope I — the only Gustav Klimt painting in a Canadian public collection — has been joined by two of the Austrian artist’s masterpieces. See them in this short video.