Two paintings from the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris will be on exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art when the collaborative exhibition "American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life" opens May 11.
Dutchmaster Jan Steen's humorous "Festive Family Meal" (painted in 1674) and Irish painter William Mulready's sentimental "Train Up a Child"(1841/1853) will be shown along with the Hudson River School painter Eastman Johnson's "Negro Life at the South" (1870) from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and American frontier painter George Caleb Bingham's "The Jolly Flatboatmen" from the Terra Foundation. Crystal Bridges'"The Life of the Hunter: A Tight Fix" by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait returns to the museum from the Louvre as part of the exhibition.
The inclusion of the Dutch and Irish works are meant to give viewers an idea of the art that American genre painters had studied. The exhibition runs through Aug. 12, when it will travel to the High.