New York Sales and Exhibitions

This year, Christie’s will host its Old Master paintings sale on 4 February followed by a sale of Old Master and British drawings on the 5th. The following week, the 11th-13th will see a series of sales of the collection of Irene Roosevelt Aitken, a benefactor and honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum and patron of the Metropolitan Opera, Frick Collection and Morgan Library and Museum. Up Madison Avenue, at its new premises in the Breuer Building, Sotheby’s is selling Master Drawings from the Collection of Diane A. Nixon on 4 February, alongside its Old Master Drawings sale, and Old Master Paintings on February 5th and 6th. Also on the 5th is its sale of the Lester L. Weindling Collection. Together with a host of exhibitions by dealers participating in Master Drawings week, there is plenty to see!

All of this makes it somewhat surprising that there are not more exhibitions dedicated to the old masters at local museums during this period. Last year, for instance, we enjoyed the spectacular Siena: The rise of painting, 1300 – 1350 at the Met (2025), while the year before that we visited Spirit and Invention: Drawings by Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo at the Morgan (2024) and Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini at the Frick (2024). Even so, we can recommend a handful of Old Master and 19th Century exhibitions on view either in New York City or within reach of a day trip.

The Metropolitan Museum is currently featuring Seeing silence: the paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck (closes 5 April), an introduction to the work of Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862 – 1946) who remains relatively little known outside the Nordic countries. Having begun her training working as a realist in art school in Paris, Schjerfbeck moved toward an increasingly abstract style. The show includes nearly 60 examples of her work, among them notable loans from the Finnish National Gallery and private collections throughout Finland and Sweden, where Schjerfbeck spent her final years.

The Morgan Library is offering Renoir Drawings (through 8 February), looking at the artist’s drawings, pastels and watercolours from his student days to the end of his life. The exhibition, writes the museum, ‘was inspired by the major gift to the Morgan of a large-scale preparatory sketch for one of Renoir’s most significant paintings, The Great Bathers’. Impressionism enthusiasts will also want to visit the Brooklyn Art Museum to catch the final days of Monet and Venice (until 1 February), the first exhibition since 1912 to focus on Monet’s luminous depictions of La Serenissima.

Slightly further afield, a brief train journey will take you to New Haven, where the Yale University Art Museum is showing American Impressionism (through 14 June). The show, which includes examples by many leading names in the genre (Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and James Abbot McNeil Whistler, as well as the landscapes of John Singer Sargent), celebrates the moment in the late 19th Century when American landscape painting broke free of the Academic grandeur of the Hudson River School style that had predominated. Artists working in the new, freer manner – akin to what was being practiced by Monet and his compatriots in France – favoured local scenes and brighter colours, and the exhibition includes prints and drawings as well as paintings.

Around the corner at the Yale Center for British Art, Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750 – 1850 focuses on so-called ‘Company paintings’, or the artworks produced by British, Indian and Chinese artists in the wake of the founding of the British East India Company in 1600. Although the entity itself bolstered British imperialist ambitions, it also facilitated a blending of cultural influences in the arts, and ‘Company School’ artworks – like the Indian School watercolour currently offered for sale at Dickinson – are those produced by native artists and artisans for British collectors and patrons.

A short train journey in the opposite direction will take you to Princeton, where the University art museum has recently opened after a multi-year refurbishment and expansion that nearly doubled the size of the original space. The museum is currently featuring highlights from the permanent collection in Face to face (through 1 May), with portraiture from a range of media, cultures and time periods.