Tailleur pour dames is the first major Surrealist painting to enter MFA Boston’s collection. In the painting, Varo, a woman and European immigrant to the Americas, explores dreams, the unconscious, and beauty in the familiar. A customer peers through her lorgnette at three magical garments: a rose-colored dress that transforms into a sailboat, a blue scarf stiffening into a seat and tray for cocktails, and a dark hooded cloak that fizzes like champagne. A tailor, whose nose and eyeglasses take the shape of scissors, recedes into the background, but his shadow looms over the client and her choices.

Oil on board.

Museum purchase with funds by exchange from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection--Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe, and a Gift of the Stephen and Sybil Stone Foundation. © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.

2021.1077

In the 1920s, Blanche Lazzell, an early American adopter of modernism, became the figurehead of a group of primarily women artists known as the Provincetown Printers. Based in Provincetown, a small fishing village and artistic hub at the tip of Cape Cod, the group achieved national prominence for their innovative color woodblock prints. Provincetown Back Yards is one of Lazzell’s finest prints, boldly outlined and vividly colored. It is one of more than four hundred works by artists associated with the Provincetown Printers acquired from the collection of the late Leslie and late Johanna Garfield—the most significant collection of its kind.

Color woodcut (white-line).

The Leslie and Johanna Garfield Collection—Partial gift of Leslie and Johanna Garfield and Museum purchase with funds from the Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund and John H. and Ernestine A. Payne Fund.

2022.1508

Eduardo Paolozzi’s portfolio of twelve prints, As Is When, is widely considered one of the earliest and most important examples of Pop printmaking in England. Inspired by the life and ideas of the early 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paolozzi used the medium of screen printing to translate his collages of found ephemera—pulled from pattern books, engineering drawings, photographs, and more—into shimmering, surreal compositions. The portfolio is part of a transformational bequest of more than 2,000 modern and contemporary prints from the collection of the late Richard E. Caves (1931–2019), a longtime MFA Boston supporter and passionate print collector.

Color screen print.

Bequest of Richard E. Caves. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

2022.1295

An oversize squirrel native to India climbs up to enjoy the fruits of a large tropical tree in this work, among the most dazzlingly successful of all paintings made for the British in India. Its sponsor was Sir Elijah Impey, chief justice of the Supreme Court established by the East India Company, and his wife, Mary, Lady Impey. The acquisition of this and one other painting made for the Impeys by Mughal-trained artists represents the achievement of one of MFA Boston’s foremost goals for South Asian art: collecting works of the highest quality from the period of British colonialism.

Pen and ink, watercolor with gum Arabic.

Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund.

2022.194

The Castellani family is among the most celebrated of 19th-century jewelers. Known for participating in excavations outside Rome, the father and sons were deeply skilled in creating jewelry inspired by ancient Etruscan goldsmiths and incorporating historical iconography. The imagery for this brooch was likely borrowed from one of two floor mosaics with lions discovered in Pompeii.

This brooch was a gift from Susan B. Kaplan, who over the past 15 years has championed jewelry at MFA Boston. In particular, her deep interest in, and knowledge of, 19th-century jewelry has led to great depth in this area of the collection.

Gold and glass (micromosaic).

Gift of Susan Beth Kaplan.

2021.756

In the photo book Chizu (The Map) Kawada Kikuji’s raw and often apocalyptic images serve as metaphors for the profound impact of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the resulting dislocation of Japanese society following the Second World War. MFA Boston has acquired Kawada’s complete set of 87 photographs from Chizu, the negatives, the artist’s binders with his contact sheets and notes, and a first edition of the photo book. This monumental acquisition provides an important foundation for the Japanese photography collection that the Museum is now building.

Gelatin silver print.

Museum purchase with funds by exhange from the Bequest of Charles W. Millard III. © Kawada Kikuji, courtesy of L. Parker Stephenson Photographs.

2022.1298.74

Arshile Gorky was a pivotal figure in the shift to abstraction that transformed 20th-century American art. Untitled (Composition) is a consummate example of how Gorky’s drawings from this seminal period of his career blur the boundaries of landscape (the bucolic area around his parents-in-laws’ house in Virginia), still life, and poetic fantasy. Oddly shaped and tumbling near-abstract biomorphic forms, rendered with dancing and exuberant black-ink lines, evoke the landscape and nature within it. The drawing is a gift of Susan Paine, an Honorary Trustee, longtime advocate, friend, and supporter of MFA Boston.

Black ink and crayon on paper; verso: black ink.

Gift of Susan W. Paine in honor of Mark Kerwin, MFA CFO (1999–2022), for his 22 years of Dedication, Loyalty, and Expertise offered the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS).

2021.723

Joannes Ruckers was the second in a family of highly influential harpsichord makers in 17th-century Antwerp. The family’s instruments were prized well after their workshops fell silent, and their instruments were continually reworked over the decades and centuries. This instrument is no exception, having had its range extended in the 18th century and, importantly, an overall restoration conducted in the beginning of the 20th century. That work was undertaken, just a few miles away from MFA Boston, by trailblazing historical instrument maker and player Arnold Dolmetsch.

Poplar, spruce, bone, bog oak.

Arthur Tracy Cabot Fund.

2021.550

An early oil painting by Thomas Sills, an underrecognized midcentury abstract practitioner, Travel is characteristic of the artist’s work from the period. The centralized composition, seemingly infused by an inner light that emanates outward, alludes to the natural world as well as Sills’s childhood working in a greenhouse in the American South. Encouraged by his wife, mosaic artist Jeanne Reynal, and their mutual friend Willem de Kooning, Sills began painting in the 1950s without formal training. He chose to utilize rags instead of brushes to generate his painting’s soft and luminous blends of pigment.

Oil on canvas.

J. Atwood and Elizabeth Ives Purchase Fund. © 2023 Estate of Thomas Sills / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

2022.1308

Influenced by both Japanese and Western pop culture, Yoshitomo Nara is internationally known for his cartoonish paintings and sculptures of children and dogs. Created during his student days at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany (1989–1993), Peculiar marks an important stage in Nara’s artistic development. An early iteration of his now-iconic style, the painting prefigures the stark compositions of his portraits of menacing young figures with few or no narrative clues. The generous gift of this work comes from Joan and Michael Salke, longtime MFA Boston supporters.

Acrylic on canvas.

Gift of Joan and Michael Salke in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © Yoshitomo Nara.

2021.555

Artemisia Gentileschi was among the most important painters working in 17th-century Italy. This picture’s signature, “Arte. GentilescA / fecit Napo,” emphasizes two aspects of the artist’s identity: her gender and her geographic location. It must have been one of the first works that Gentileschi painted upon arriving in Naples in 1630, where she spent most of the rest of her life. Documents reveal that she made small works on copper throughout her career, but this is only the third to emerge. It therefore represents an important but lesser-known facet of Gentileschi’s production.

Oil on copper.

Charles Potter Kling and Beth Munroe Fund.

2022.102

This fragmentary relief of flying angels playing musical instruments exemplifies the work of the Flemish-born sculptor François Duquesnoy (1597–1643), who achieved great success in papal Rome. Very likely a sketch model for a relief carved in marble for a church in Naples, the terracotta shows the lively and tender way Duquesnoy presented winged babies (putti in Italian), the subject for which he is best known. Delicately and skillfully blending higher and lower relief, it fills a major gap in the Museum’s collection, which lacks fine examples of early Baroque sculpture.

Terracotta.

Anonymous gift.

2021.705

John Wilson committed his life and work to exploring African American experiences. He began Eternal Presence in 1982, when he was commissioned to create a major work for the grounds of the National Center for Afro-American Art, down the street from the MFA in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. Wilson, who studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, conceived of Eternal Presence with the MFA in mind. “It was my answer to all the omissions, the things I did not see at the Boston MFA,” he said. “I wanted to make a Black image that you could not ignore.”

Bronze.

William Francis Warden Fund. © Estate of John Wilson.

2022.1

As a tool of dynastic propaganda, this coin was struck by the Roman emperor Septimius Severus to celebrate his wife Julia Domna as a paragon of piety and protectress of Rome, like the goddess Vesta, who is invoked in the inscription. Vesta’s temple, shown on the reverse side of the coin, was one of the most sacred buildings in Rome, and its priestesses tended the sacred fire that was linked to the Empire’s fate. It housed important legal documents as well as cult objects, such as the Palladium, the statue of Athena/Minerva thought to have been brought back from Troy by Aeneas.

Gold.

Theodora Wilbour Fund in memory of Zoë Wilbour.

2022.1295