Visiting Masterpieces

An extraordinary loan—don't miss your chance to see the painting that inspired a generation of artists.

An extraordinary loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art gives you the opportunity to see two of the great masterpieces of French painting in America hanging side by side: Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers and the MFA’s own Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? by Paul Gauguin. Painted from 1900–1906 and 1897–1898, respectively, these works form a bridge from the 19th to 20th century and influenced a generation of modern artists that included Picasso and Matisse. Both pictures address a classical tradition of representing the idealized nude in an idyllic landscape, yet both also break with convention, conjuring radically new visions of earthly paradise. Exhibited together for the first time in Boston, the paintings will be on view as part of the MFA's Visiting Masterpieces series in the Sidney and Esther Rabb Gallery.

Hear from MFA curator Emily Beeny.

Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers (detail), 1900–06. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1937.