The Masterworks of New Brunswick’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery — a collection endowed by 20th-century Canadian newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook — is coming to the Audain Art Museum.
Paintings by Salvador Dali, John Constable, Eugène Delacroix, Lucian Freud, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, Alfred Sisley, Graham Sutherland and J.M.W. Turner are part of the tour, which comes to the Audain’s temporary exhibition gallery on June 18 for a three-month visit, until Sept. 11.
In all, 75 paintings are part of the show, which also includes key works in Canadian art by Lawren Harris, Emily Carr, Cornelius Krieghoff and James Wilson Morrice.
The exhibition is the only stopover for the Beaverbrook collection in British Columbia.
The Audain’s executive director Suzanne Greening said in a release that the exhibition is “a unique opportunity to spend time with old friends and make new acquaintances. For example, Salvador Dali’s Santiago El Grande is considered one of his most important surrealist works and is sure to inspire awe.”
Other works in the show include San Vigilio, Lake Garda (1913) by John Singer Sargent, Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Nugent (1764) by Thomas Gainsborough, and The Fountain of Indolence (1834) by J.M.W. Turner.
The Masterworks is the first national and international tour of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s collection, organized in 2009 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the gallery, which is based in Fredericton.
When the Beaverbrook Art Gallery opened in 1959, Dr. W.G. Constable, the former director of Britain’s National Gallery, said the collection was “incomparably the greatest contribution made by Lord Beaverbrook to the arts in Canada.”
For more information please visit www.audainartmuseum.com.
