European Splendors

One of America’s premier art collectors and patrons was Samuel H. Kress (1863–1955), who made his fortune through the chain of popular S. H. Kress & Co. five-and-dime department stores throughout the U.S., including in Alabama.  A building that housed Montgomery’s original Kress location is now an architectural landmark on Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery. Kress used his fortune to buy primarily European old master paintings, and he wanted to bring the appreciation of these works to everyday Americans in the midst of the Great Depression. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation built on this idea by donating artworks permanently to more than 40 regional and university museums nationwide, including the donation of two works to the MMFA in 1936 and 1937. After a large donation to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the second largest gift of Kress works was made to the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina.

European Splendors contains 30 works from Columbia’s collection that survey European painting representing the arc of Italian art from the late Medieval to the Baroque period, works that demonstrate renewed emphasis on the human condition as realism and individuality re-emerged out of the more abstract and symbolic religious subjects that had defined the European Middle Ages for centuries. The selection culminates with examples of Dutch portraiture and still life, along with works that illustrate the impulse to bring a piece of history home as a souvenir from one’s Grand Tour, as well as the 18th-century mania for Greek and Roman ruins.