Delacroix to Monet: Masterpieces of 19th-Century Painting from the Walters Art Museum

Assembled over a period of more than 140 years, the collection of the Walters Art Museum entails one of the finest holdings of 19th-century paintings in the United States.  The only West Coast venue for the exhibition, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art presented forty works from this renowned collection, selected for their art-historical significance and superior quality.  Although strongly weighted in favor of French painting, this exhibition, like the collection, also included major works by British, Spanish, and American artists.  On view were such masterpieces as Eugène Delacroix’s powerful Christ on the Sea of Galilee, 1854, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ perfected, late version of Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1864, Edgar Degas’ splendid Before the Race, 1882-1884, and such favorites as Edouard Manet’s At the Café, ca. 1879, and Claude Monet’s Springtime, ca. 1872.