Denver Art Museum - Hamilton Collection

by Sarah Judson February 10, 2014

Last month, Frederic C. Hamilton, chairman emeritus of the Denver Art Museum and namesake of their Hamilton Building addition which opened in 2006, donated 22 Impressionist masterworks, the largest bequest in the museum's history. They include the museum's first Van Gogh, Edge of a Wheat Field with Poppies, shown above.

Also included are paintings by Monet, Morisot, Cézanne, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley, among others. Above is Eugène Boudin's painting Le Havre, Anchored Vessels in the Harbor, done about 1868-72. Boudin learned plein air from the Barbizon painters in the late 1840s, and is best known for the advice he gave to the teenage Claude Monet: "Everything that is painted directly on the spot has always a strength, a power, a vividness of touch that one doesn't find again in the studio."

Two American painters are included in the collection, Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase (above, Landscape at Shinnecock). The Impressionist exhibit Nature as Muse, which includes the Hamilton Collection, will be on view through March 23rd at general admission pricing.

At right is Paul Cézanne's 9"x12" oil sketch, A Painter at Work. The paintings by Cézanne and Boudin are also the first in the Denver Art Museum's collection.
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