Oberlin, Ohio—Four masterpieces of British painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art are on view at Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) beginning April 4 as part of an ongoing collaboration with the CMA, through June 4th. Portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds join landscapes by Richard Wilson and John Constable to complement a selection of British paintings from the Allen, one of the U.S.’s finest college art museums. British works from the AMAM collection currently on view include paintings by Reynolds, John Hoppner, William Hogarth, John Martin, and Joseph Wright of Derby.

"We are delighted to give these important works from the Cleveland Museum of Art a temporary home while their museum undergoes expansion,” says Stephanie Wiles, John G. W. Cowles Director of the AMAM. “We especially appreciate the opportunity these loans represent for our students, since a large number of College classes come through the Allen’s galleries every day. We are also very grateful for the enthusiasm our CMA colleagues have shown for this continuing collaboration.”

Beginning this fall, a major exhibition of nearly three dozen American paintings from the Cleveland Museum of Art will spend three months at the Allen, and in spring 2007, a selection of about 30 Old Master paintings from Cleveland will come to Oberlin.

When seen alongside the AMAM’s own works, the British paintings from Cleveland offer interesting comparisons. Gainsborough’s powerful portrait of George Pitt, First Lord Rivers (ca. 1768–69), for example, highlights the contrasts between 18th-century British portraitists, including Gainsborough’s rivals Reynolds and William Hogarth. Works by both of these artists are on view nearby. Another fascinating comparison to the Gainsborough is the Allen’s portrait of John Lord Wodehouse (1764) by Pompeo Batoni, an Italian artist.

Reynolds’ The Ladies Amabel and Mary Jemima Yorke (ca. 1761) hangs near the Allen’s own similarly tender Reynolds portrait The Strawberry Girl, made more than a dozen years later. With its extensive picturesque vista and soft tonalities, Wilson’s Cader Idris with the Mawddach River (ca. 1774) looks back to 17th-century landscape painting. It presents a wonderful comparison with one of the Allen’s most beautiful landscapes, Joseph Wright of Derby’s Dovedale by Moonlight, painted just a decade later. Both pictures were influenced by their painters’ Italian sojourns, but Wright’s shows him working very differently, closely observing the famous rock formations along the Dove River.

Constable’s Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead (1828) is an ideal work to illustrate the differences between late 18th-century landscape sensibility and new developments in painting that came early in the 19th century. Constable regularly worked outdoors, and his powerfully charged brushstrokes invest the landscape with emotion and drama. Constable’s rich palette makes a telling contrast with the luminous transparency of J.M.W. Turner’s View of Venice: The Ducal Palace (1841), on view nearby in the Allen's Sculpture Court.

Visit The Allen Memorial Art Museum at : www.oberlin.edu/allenart