Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Collections: European
Bowdoin’s nearly 400 European art works (excluding prints and drawings) range from the medieval to the modern period and, uniquely in Maine, represent the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, as well as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1961 Bowdoin was one of 23 college museums to receive a group of Italian Renaissance paintings, many in period frames, from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Notable among these twelve works is a cassone (wedding chest) panel recently attributed to the young Fra Angelico.
Major works of Northern Baroque painting include van Vliet’s Church Interior and Moeyaert’s Meeting of Joseph and Jacob in Egypt. Nineteenth and twentieth century holdings by Corot, Gérome, Boudin, Dupré, Bayre, and Carpeaux have recently been augmented by a bequest which includes works by Magritte, Picasso, Braque, and Matta, among other European modernists.
The Molinari Collection, given in 1966, consists of more than 1500 examples and is one of the three major public collections of medals and plaquettes in the United States. A comprehensive survey of Italian, French, and other northern European material, it provides an overview of European history from 1450 to 1850 and a window to the world of classical history, architecture, myth, and epigraphy.
