Renaissance to Romanticism

Renaissance to Romanticism (Art Gallery 2) celebrates the Ulster Museum’s collection of pre-1900 paintings. This display is usually presented in two adjoining galleries, however, due to building work to upgrade our storage areas, we have made a benefit of this temporary closure by showing all the finest pre-1900 paintings in a single gallery.

This condensed hang focuses on three themes: the best of the Italian, Flemish and Dutch paintings from the early 16th century to the 18th century, the development of landscape painting, and in particular the development of landscape painting in Ireland, and a series of portraits of sitters who are either local or have links with the north of Ireland.

Spanning the early 1600s to the mid-1800s, Renaissance to Romanticism includes some of the most important paintings in the collection, and highlights a significant new acquisition, a Nativity by Baldassare Peruzzi.

In the gallery

Renoir’s L’allée au bois is the first French Impressionist painting to enter a public collection in Northern Ireland and represents an outstandingly important acquisition for the Ulster Museum. It fills an important gap in the collection, and will enable a deeper understanding of the work of the ‘Irish Impressionists’ such as Roderic O’Conor, John Lavery and Paul Henry, who travelled to France to study the achievements of Impressionism in the years after 1870. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of the leading figures of Impressionism in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s. Throughout these years Impressionist painters created an entirely new style of painting, using only loose, fragmented brush strokes to evoke the changing colours and myriad qualities of light.

Born in Limoges, Renoir moved to Paris as a child. There he met Claude Monet with whom he developed the ideas and techniques of Impressionism and made painting trips to the forest of Fontainebleau and at La Grenouillère, a boating resort on the River Seine not far from Paris. L’allée au bois’ was painted between 1874 and 1880 in a wood near Paris, although the precise location is unknown. The small light-filled woodland scene is a purely Impressionist work giving the viewer the sense of entering a forest glade where a light breeze gently rustles leaves and grasses in the heat and dappled shade of a late afternoon summer’s day.

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Photograph © Christie’s. Accepted in lieu of Inheritance tax by HM Government in 2023 and allocated to the Ulster Museum with the assistance of grants from the Department for Communities, the Art Fund, the Esmé Mitchell Trust and the Friends of the Ulster Museum.

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The Nativity by Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536), the first High Renaissance painting to enter a public collection in Northern Ireland, is also on display in this gallery.

Painted around 1515 in Rome, The Nativity is an exceptionally rare surviving work by Peruzzi. It is the only painting by the artist in the UK! A highly talented Italian painter, architect and draughtsman, Peruzzi was born in 1481 in a small town near Siena. After Michelangelo and Raphael, he was the leading artistic figure in Rome during the first decades of the 1500s, an intensely creative period now termed the High Renaissance. 

Almost all of Peruzzi’s painted work was in fresco and much has been lost, making The Nativity an incredibly rare surviving work on panel. The painting has been undergoing conservation work and scientific analysis at the National Gallery in London before it moved to our museum and its permanent home here in Northern Ireland. 

The Nativity is the first High Renaissance painting to enter the Ulster Museum collection, enabling us to offer access to Renaissance art of the highest quality to our audiences.

This painting was acquired following export deferral with the assistance of grants from the Art Fund, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Department for Communities NI and the Esmé Mitchell Trust, 2022. We'd also like to credit the National Conservation Programme and the Aldama Foundation.