Nationalmuseum has acquired View of Vesuvius from Villa Quisisana, one of the few Italian landscapes by Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857) still in private hands. The newly acquired painting is an important document from a particularly significant period in Dahl’s life.
This summer’s exhibition at Nationalmuseum, 100 Great Paintings, will be a chance to revisit old favourites from the museum’s collection and to discover new ones. Exactly 100 paintings will be on show, with the emphasis on works from the late 19th century. To accompany the exhibition, Nationalmuseum is producing a lavishly illustrated catalogue and an app that serves as an audio guide.
Thanks to a generous donation by the photographer Hans Gedda, Nationalmuseum has acquired an extensive collection of photographic portraits by Rolf Winquist. The donation comprises a mixture of exhibition-quality material and test shots. They show Winquist’s technical mastery and his artistic eye, which brought the individual character of the models into relief.
To add to its collection of paintings from the Danish Golden Age, Nationalmuseum has acquired a portrait by Christen Købke of the artist’s nephew, Johan Jacob Krohn, at the age of five. Painted in 1846, the portrait is one of the artist’s most sensitive, successfully capturing the child’s personality.
Nationalmuseum has acquired two watercolour paintings showing two different sides of the publicly loved artist Ivar Arosenius. Evil Powers is a jocular personification of evil, depicting a she-dragon with her young. The second work is a sketch for a fairytale series entitled The Caliph’s Golden Bird.Over the years, Nationalmuseum has continuously added works by this artist to its collection.
Nationalmuseum at Konstakademien
Denise Grünstein – En face
19 February – 3 May
The exhibition on and by photographer Denise Grünstein is based on the suite of images 1866 taken in the empty museum building at the start of 2014. 19 works from the suite are on show for the first time, as well as a number of selected works from earlier suites of images.
100 Great Paintings
11 June
Nationalmuseum has acquired a magnificent English cabinet in imitation lacquer. Manufactured circa 1680, the cabinet had been part of the Biby estate collection since 1788. Nationalmuseum purchased the piece at last summer’s auction of items from the Biby estate.
An exhibition on and by photographer Denise Grünstein will open at Nationalmuseum on 19 February. The exhibition is based on the art project that the photographer ran in the empty museum building earlier this year. The suite of images is entitled 1866 after the year in which the museum opened and it is being shown for the first time.
Nationalmuseum has acquired a work by Domenico Fetti, one of the truly important Italian Baroque painters. The painting comes from a Swedisg collection and has not been shown to the public since 1963. Several details strongly suggest that this was the first of the two known closely related versions of this composition, something that upcoming art technological studies will tell.
Saturday 15 November will see the unveiling of the 2014 Portrait of Honour at Gripsholm Castle. This year, choreographer and director Mats Ek has been captured by photographer Lesley Leslie-Spinks. Mats Ek is renowned for his new interpretations of ballet classics, most recently in the acclaimed Juliet and Romeo.
Nationalmuseum Design is opening up in Kulturhuset in Stockholm on 6 February. The first exhibition is a collaboration with the podcast Summit and contains highly personal and subjective selections. In Subjectivities – selected design the designers and the museum choose objects from each other.
Nationalmuseum has made a major loan of 17th-century Dutch paintings to an exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. The exhibition opens on 31 October and surveys one of the golden ages of European culture. The loan comprises some 30 works form the museum’s prominent collection, among them The Kitchen Maid by Rembrandt.
