Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Bruegel. Printed

Städel Museum

June 18 to September 20, 2026

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526/30–1569) is one of the most outstanding artists of 16th-century Dutch art. His works transport viewers into a fascinating world of humorous imagery and enigmatic motifs. Known primarily as a painter today, he made a name for himself early on as a designer of prints.

The Städel Museum's exhibition "Bruegel. Printed" brings together around 45 exceptional prints based on Bruegel's drawings. They reveal him as a unique inventor and distinctive storyteller: his subjects range from expansive landscapes to secular and religious symbols and scenes of everyday life.

Bruegel's works were created in close collaboration with the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock and his wife Volcxken Diericx. They convey a vivid impression of the artist's unique visual world, which unites observation and imagination. Drawing on his predilection for the intricate, grotesque motifs of Hieronymus Bosch and his broad knowledge of pictorial and motif traditions, he developed new forms of representation for traditional themes. His compositions, often employing exaggeration, elicit laughter from the audience while simultaneously prompting reflection. Bruegel addresses human weaknesses and injustices, alludes to the grandeur of nature, and focuses on everyday interactions. To this day, his works offer surprisingly relevant perspectives on fundamental questions of human values.

The Städel Museum's presentation begins with Bruegel's prints from its own collection, of which approximately 30 are on display. This selection is complemented by loans from the Albertina in Vienna and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München (State Graphic Collection Munich).

In addition, the exhibition features two paintings by his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, as well as further prints from the Städel Museum's impressive collection of Dutch prints, including works after Frans Floris, Lambert Lombard, and Raphael.

The exhibition is made possible by the support of the Städel Museum Association.

Philipp Demandt , Director of the Städel Museum, on the exhibition: “With our exhibition on Bruegel’s prints, the Städel once again opens its doors to the extraordinary treasures of its Graphic Collection, which, with around 100,000 drawings and prints from the late Middle Ages to the present day, is one of the most important collections of its kind in Germany. Visitors are invited to embark on an impressive journey of discovery through Bruegel’s multifaceted visual worlds, full of narrative power, subtle observations, and surprising details.”

Astrid Reuter , head of the graphic arts collection up to 1800 at the Städel Museum: “Bruegel’s pictorial inventions were already extremely popular during his lifetime. They not only served as entertainment but also formed the subject of scholarly discussions. The special appeal of his works arises from the interplay of naturalism, inventiveness, and humorous exaggeration. Appreciated as imaginative inventions and critical reflections on human values and behaviors, they continue to invite discovery, reflection, and even laughter.”

Curator: Dr. Astrid Reuter (Head of the Graphic Collection up to 1800, Städel Museum)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, The Big Fish Eat the Little Fish, 1570

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, etched and engraved by Jan and Lucas van Doetecum, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1555–56

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, Patience (Patientia), 1557

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, engraved by Philipp Galle, Temperance (Temperantia), ca. 1560

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, Everyman (Elck), ca. 1558

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, Sloth (Desidia), 1558

Pieter Brueghel the Younger after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Dance at the Peasant Wedding, c. 1625

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Engraved by Philipp Galle, Prudence (Prudentia)

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Book: Vermeer’s Afterlives

How a once-forgotten Dutch painter inspired generations of artists, writers, and filmmakers

Hardcover

Price:: $39.95/£35.00
ISBN: 9780691277820

Published:: Jun 23, 2026
Copyright:: 2026
Pages:: 320
Size:: 7 x 10 in.
Illus:: 146 color illus.

Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) is one of the most beloved painters in the world. But when an enterprising French journalist and art critic set out to recover his work in the mid-nineteenth century, both his name and achievement were virtually forgotten. Vermeer’s Afterlives tells the remarkable story of how one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age was lost to obscurity until the rise of art history as a new discipline introduced his work to modern audiences and asks why his art compels so many other artists to respond with works of their own.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell traces the cultural ascendency of this extraordinary painter, whose enigmatic subjects and quiet, introspective interiors, transfigured by light and color, continue to captivate viewers far removed from his native Delft. We meet the critics who first welcomed Vermeer into the canon along with the painters who sought to imitate him, the forgers who tried to pass off their work as his own, and the contemporary artists who openly repurpose it. The enquiry concludes by looking at Vermeer’s paintings through the eyes of the poets and novelists who have attempted to translate his silence into words and give voice to the stories he left untold. Along the way, Yeazell interrogates the changing assumptions that govern art history, while demonstrating how paintings live on not only in later paintings but in poetry, fiction, photography, and film.

Marking the 350th anniversary of Vermeer’s death, this beautifully illustrated book explores the variety of ways in which Vermeer’s art has been interpreted through the centuries and shows how his paintings take on afterlives of their own in the imaginations of those who view them.

AUTHOR

Ruth Bernard Yeazell is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. Her books include Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names and Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (both Princeton). Her work has appeared in leading publications such as the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books.

PRAISE

"Beautifully illustrated. . . . [Vermeer’s Afterlives is] an authoritative, insightful work of art history."—Kirkus Reviews starred review

"[Ruth Bernard Yeazell] marshals rigorous analysis to show how the artists, filmmakers, writers, and critics who carried forward Vermeer’s “afterlives” have expanded, innovated, and sometimes transformed the meaning of his work. Serious admirers of the painter will want this on their bookshelves."—Publishers Weekly

"Beautifully illustrated. . . . [Vermeer’s Afterlives’s] clarity, fluidity, and accessibility are impressive. Particularly noteworthy is Yeazell’s considerable skill in interweaving Vermeer’s oeuvre with paintings by other artists, films, poetry, fiction, photography, and scientific work."—Amy Ione, Leonardo Reviews

"[Vermeer’s Afterlives] deepen[s] our understanding of this singular figure, whose scant oeuvre of some three dozen pictures has bequeathed a continually radiating light."—Kelly Presutti, Art in America

“Ruth Bernard Yeazell provides a revelatory new account of a fascinating and multifaceted subject: the reception of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Vermeer from the period of his putative ‘rediscovery’ in the 1860s through to the present day. The book covers not only the nuances of scholarship on Vermeer, but also the responses of artists, filmmakers, poets, and novelists. Yeazell’s deft and imaginative treatment makes these varied responses come alive and shows why Vermeer’s art has proved so compelling to modern audiences.”—Elizabeth Prettejohn, author of Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War

“The story of the rediscovery of Johannes Vermeer in the mid-nineteenth century, and the subsequent fascination with his art until the present day, is at the core of Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s engaging and important book. Yeazell explores the various ways Vermeer’s paintings, which seem so perfect in their colors, compositions, and subject matter and yet reach deep into the emotional core of human life, inspired the imagination of artists, novelists, poets, and filmmakers. Yeazell’s book is a compelling in-depth study of Vermeer’s long-lasting impact on popular culture and the various ways in which artists and writers appropriated his imagery in their own creative works.”—Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., author of Vermeer: The Complete Works

A LOOK INSIDE

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Richard Estes

Woods and Waters

July 3 – August 1, 2026

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, Maine

Richard Estes (born 1932) is best known for his complex photo-realistic images of urban shop windows and their mind-eye confounding reflections. However, his work also attests to a well-traveled eye for distant places, including Mount Desert Island and Lake Champlain. While helping Alice Walton select artworks destined for the permanent collection of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, she fell in love with one Este’s icy views of a massive, calving ice-shelf in Antarctica. Before the museum opened, we installed the painting just inside the front door of her rural Texas ranch house, greeting visitors with its chilling blast of frozen air—at once welcoming and disorienting—in much the same way as his better-known images of concatenated reflections distort and confuse and visually echo New York’s windowed storefronts.

A contrarian by nature and trained on American realism at the Art Institute of Chicago—Eakins, Homer, Hopper, etc.—it is possible that Estes’s style developed out of healthy skepticism for the primacy of either realism or abstraction. Why not both? That is to say, his use of photography for paintings seems to suggest precise replication of photographic sources. His paintings, however, are not that. Instead, Estes often combines views from multiple photographs and slightly shifted perspectives — combining both close-up and background spaces — that no human eye, nor the camera, is capable of clearly seeing at the same time in sharp focus.

His landscapes, moreover, examine and celebrate the mostly uncelebrated, more intimate views of nature underfoot or from points of view largely determined by diminishing visual access—whether from the wake-racing deck of a tourist boat on Lake Champlain or a crowded mountain hiking trail on Mt. Cadillac in Acadia National Park. It has become nearly impossible to personally experience wilderness in America, perhaps another reason Estes paints with such close, detailed passion.

It is also no surprise that the pre-eminent art historian of 19th-century American painting, John Wilmerding, whose groundbreaking National Gallery of Art exhibition (Washington, D.C., 1980) devoted to American Luminism, which tellingly included the Maine paintings of Fitz Henry Lane and Frederic Church, among others, was a huge fan of Estes’s work. “Estes brings two consummate talents to his art,” Este’s Mount Desert neighbor, Wilmerding explains, “the ability to select out of the random chaos and imperfections of the world around him something worth looking at, and the rarified craftsmanship to transform that view into something cleansed and purified, orderly and even harmonious.[1] This phenomenological approach, and the artist’s 21st century adherence to perceptual dislocations, is revealed in these side-long, panoramic tourist-boat-framed and distant vistas and in Estes’s downward-looking views of the forest understory—broken, twisting limbs and winter’s dark leaf leavings. He gives us the numinous remains of summers’ past, never to be seen again. There is no 19th-century, romantic sublime here, these unfixed, near and far, vast and complex, “God-bothered,” lands.[2]

Christopher B. Crosman

Thomaston, Maine

[1] John Wilmerdign, Richard Estes, (New York, Rizzoli, 2006), 219

[2] Sebastian Smee describing the paintings of Frederic Church, “The Artist Who Made America Look Like a Promised Land,” The New Yorker, May 11 & 18, 20026 print edition.

Richard Estes (b. 1932)

Acadia Park III, 2020

Oil on panel

12" x 24"

Richard Estes (b. 1932)

Acadia Park IV, 2020

Oil on masonite

12-3/4" x 18"

Richard Estes (b. 1932)

Lake Champlain VIIII, 1996

Oil on paper mounted on board

20" x 14-1/2"

Richard Estes (b. 1932)

The Coastline of Maine, 2006

Oil on board

13-7/8" x 19-1/2"

Richard Estes (b. 1932)

Beech Hill I, 2010

Oil on panel

22-3/4" x 15-1/2"

Richard Estes (b. 1932)

Acadia Park VII, 2020

Oil on panel

14" x 18"

Also

"Richard is a living icon of American painting. While trends and movements come and go, Richard has stayed true to his vision and singular approach to painting for more than 50 years." — Damien Hirst

This summer, Schoelkopf Gallery presents Richard Estes: My Camera Is My Sketchbook, offering a revealing look into the practice of one of the leading figures in photorealist art.

The exhibition will focus on scenes from New York City and Maine, locations where Estes has lived, worked, and found inspiration for many years. Notably, this exhibition will present photographs by Estes as standalone artworks for the first time in the artist's career. Estes has taken photographs as reference material for decades, but in this exhibition, he presents photographs as artworks unto themselves for the first time.