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Museo de Arte de Ponce Announces Treasures of the Collection in Context: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Museo de Arte de Ponce Collection Symposium

The Museo de Arte de Ponce will host an international symposium titled “Treasures of the Collection in Context: The Pre-Raphaelites in the Museo de Arte de Ponce Collection,” on February 4, 2012. From 10 am to 5 pm, renowned specialists in art history and Victorian literature will meet in this south-coast Puerto Rico city to discuss the artists and works contained in the museum’s world-famed collection.

William Holman Hunt, Miss Gladys M. Holman Hunt (The School of Nature) Museo de Arte de Ponce.

This conference represents the most important academic event ever held on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Puerto Rico. The symposium is made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Among the scholars specializing in Victorian England expected to take part in the conference are Tim Barringer (Yale University), Sally Huxtable (Northumbria University), Franny Moyle (author and BBC producer), Jason Rosenfeld (Marymount Manhattan College), Alison Smith (Tate Britain), and Madeleine Vala (University of Puerto Rico).

The remarkable collective of painters and poets that comprised the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood decried the formulaic nature of the art promulgated by the Royal Academy in London, and proposed instead to return to an “honest” art—the sort that existed, in their view, prior to Raphael. And so the Brotherhood’s name: the Pre-Raphaelites.

Museo de Arte de Ponce’s British Collection consists of sixty-six objects dating from 1760 to 1905. Forty of these works are Pre-Raphaelite paintings, drawings, and a photograph. It represents one of the clear strengths among its holdings, and the nucleus of Victorian works in the British Collection has been called one of the most important outside London itself.

“This symposium will be a milestone in the Museum’s history, as it will offer, for the first time, a broad look at these wonderful works of art outside the context in which they were created,” said Agustín Arteaga, the museum’s director and chief executive officer, who then added, “Through this international symposium we will be bringing this important group of works to the attention of a broader public and continuing to promote our permanent collection as an object of study and intercultural dialogue.”

The conference will serve as a preamble to the publication, in the summer of 2012, of a catalog of the Museo de Arte de Ponce’s British Collection, which is being co-edited by Cheryl Hartup (the museum’s curator-in-chief), Alison Smith, and Sally Anne Huxtable. This collection, which has traveled to the Tate Britain, the Prado Museum in Madrid, the Gemeente Museum in The Hague, and the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, among many others, contains such masterpieces as The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon (1881–1898) by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Flaming June (c. 1895) by Frederic, Lord Leighton. The catalog of the British Collection is planned as the first in a series of volumes on specific areas of the museum’s permanent collection, specifically those that solidify its position as an institution of great international prestige. – www.museoarteponce.org

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