Past exhibition

Exhibition: In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art

From March 24 through December 3, 2023, the Yale University Art Gallery presents In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, a selection of more than 50 paintings from the YCBA’s collection. The exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to engage with the YCBA’s artworks while the museum is closed to the public for a building conservation project. The exhibition spans four centuries of British landscape and portraiture traditions, with works by Mary Beale, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth, Gwen John, Angelica Kauffman, George Stubbs, and Joseph Mallord William Turner, among others. Several of these paintings were on view at the Gallery in 2015, where they were featured in The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760– 1860, the first major collaborative exhibition between the two Yale art museums.

In a New Light will occupy the special-exhibition galleries on the fourth floor of the Gallery’s Kahn building, which opened in 1953 and was the architect’s first significant commission and the first modernist structure on Yale’s campus. Directly across the street, Kahn’s final building, the YCBA, was completed after his death and opened to the public in 1977.

A painting of several ships in a harbor, with a city faintly visible in the background. A particularly detailed ship occupies the middle ground. Its deck is crowded with people. One of those on board appears to be either handing off or receiving something from two people who stand in an adjacent paddle boat, while another paddle boat full of people floats nearer to the foreground. The sky is yellow and pale blue, with sparse clouds.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed, 1818. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Views of the Exhibition