Jan Brueghel the Younger, The Five Senses: Sight, c. 1625, Oil on panel, 27 5/8 x 44 5/8 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection. 

WASHINGTON, DC.- This spring, The Phillips Collection presents a major exhibition exploring the evolution of American and European landscape painting. Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection features 39 masterpieces, spanning five centuries, on loan from the collection of philanthropist and entrepreneur Paul G. Allen. Co-organized by the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Paul G. Allen Family Collection, Seeing Nature is on view at the Phillips from February 6 through May 8, 2016. 

Seeing Nature began its national exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in October 2015, where it drew a significant audience over its three month run. Following the Phillips’s presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art before closing at the Seattle Art Museum in early 2017. 

“It is a pleasure to host this exhibition—beautifully executed by our west coast colleagues—and treat our audiences to the Paul G. Allen Family Collection’s landscape masterworks,” says Director Dorothy Kosinski. “Mr. Allen’s keen personal vision is evident in his collection, not unlike that of museum founder Duncan Phillips, whose collecting style was driven by his own passions and aesthetics.” 

Seeing Nature showcases the development of landscape painting from intimate views of the world to artists’ personal experiences with their surroundings. The exhibition begins with Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 17th-century allegorical series of paintings of the five senses—exceptional works which provide a platform for visitors to consider their own encounters with nature through sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste.  

Venice is sumptuously represented throughout the exhibition through stunning Venetian scenes by Canaletto, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and J. M. W. Turner, among others. These masterworks demonstrate the power of landscape to define time and place and to record, explore, and understand the natural and man-made world.  

Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking South-East from San Stae to the Fabbriche Nuove di Rialto, c. 1738, Oil on canvas, 18 1/2 x 30 5/8 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection. 

Edouard Manet, View in Venice-The Grand Canal, 1874, Oil on canvas, 22 1/2 x 18 3/4 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection. 

Claude Monet, Le palais Da Mula, Private Collection. Photo © Christie's Images

 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Depositing of John Bellini’s Three Pictures in La Chiesa Redentore, Venice, 1841, Oil on canvas, 29 x 45 1/2 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection.

Other highlights include five Monet landscapes spanning 30 years, from views of the French countryside to one of his late immersive representations of water lilies, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas (1919); evocative paintings by Paul Cézanne and Gustav Klimt; as well as modern and contemporary perspectives of landscapes by 20thcentury artists as diverse as David Hockney, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha.  

Claude Monet, Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1919, Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 79 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection. 

Gustav Klimt, Birch Forest, 1903, Oil on canvas, 42 1/4 x 42 1/4 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection.

David Hockney, The Grand Canyon, 1998, Oil on canvas, 48 1/2 x 169 1/2 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Iris VI, 1936, Oil on canvas, 36 x 24 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection.

 “The extraordinary exhibition provides a rare view of the Northwest’s most significant private art collection,” says Deputy Director for Curatorial and Academic Affairs Klaus Ottmann. “It allows us to see nature in new imaginative ways through the eyes of artists ranging from the 17th century to the present, many of whom are new to The Phillips Collection.” 

Claude Monet, En Paysage dans l’île Saint-Martin, 1881, Oil on canvas, 28 13/16 x 23 5/8 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection.

Thomas Moran, Grand Canyon of Arizona at Sunset, 1909, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection.

Max Ernst, Paysage avec lac et chimères, c. 1940, Oil on canvas, 20 x 26 inches, Paul G. Allen Family Collection.

Milton Avery, Dancing Trees, 1960. Oil on canvas, 52 x 66 in. Paul G. Allen Family Collection © 2015 Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York