Impressive London Art Exhibit Coming to Little Rock

Editor's Note: This event has passed but be sure to check out the Arkansas Arts Center site for their current exhibit. 

A different kind of British invasion is coming to Little Rock this summer: a “wow” exhibition of paintings rarely seen outside London. The Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House in London collection will be June 7-Sept. 8 at the Arkansas Arts Center.

The showing features 48 masterpieces known as the Iveagh Bequest. Most of the works have rarely been seen outside Kenwood, a neoclassical London Village, much less in the United States.  Donated to Great Britian by Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (1847-1927) and heir to the world’s most successful brewery, the collection was shaped by the tastes of the Belle Epoque-Europe’s equivalent to America’s Gilded Age.  It reveals the earl’s taste for the portraiture, landscape, and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish works that could typically be found in English aristocratic collections.

The highly acclaimed exhibition represents the greatest artists of their periods, including Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Gainsborough, Anthony van Dyck, Frans Hals, Joshua Reynolds, J.M.W. Turner and more. Among the works in the publication are Thomas Gainsborough’s Mary, Countess Howe (ca. 1764), Frans Hals’s Pieter van den Broecke (1633), Rembrandt’s sublime Portrait of the Artist (ca. 1665), Joshua Reynold’s Lady Louisa Manners (1779), and Anthony van Dyck’s Princess Henrietta of Lorraine Attended by a Page (1634).

Admission to this exhibition is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and $6 for youth/students. The Arkansas Arts Center is located in MacArthur Park at 9th and Commerce Streets in downtown Little Rock.