If you’ve ever wanted to see works of art hanging in the National Gallery of Art without having to leave the Pacific Northwest, now is your chance.
The Whatcom Museum in Bellingham opened a new exhibit this month, featuring French paintings on loan from the gallery, which is based in Washington, D.C.
The museum is one of ten selected to be a part of this year’s “Across the Nation” program, where the National Gallery loans out major works of art to be displayed in different cities.
The Whatcom Museum says it received three French masterworks on long-term loan that will be on view in a new exhibition called Verdant.
The exhibition opened Feb. 14.
The paintings are “The Battle of Love” by Paul Cézanne in 1880, “Still Life with Sleeping Woman” by Henri Matisse in 1940 and “Picking Flowers” by Auguste Renoir in 1875.
“In the Pacific Northwest, it is a rare opportunity to experience movement-defining paintings such as these that shifted the paradigm in pictorial representation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” said Whatcom Museum Chief Curator Amy Chaloupka in a news release. “Radical in their day, Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse expanded the ways artists could envision the world, with ripple effects that extended across generations and to the artists well known in our region.”
The exhibit will be open through 2026 in the museum’s Lightcatcher Building.
The Whatcom Museum says it has added new program to provide free museum admission for students in grades K-12.
For more information on the exhibition and admission, click here.