The Pre-Columbian collection at the Birmingham Museum of Art features about 500 objects primarily from ancient Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru.  The term “Pre-Columbian” refers to the arrival of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492, and has come to describe art produced by Native American cultures of Central and South America prior to European contact and colonization.  The collection represents all of the regions and major culture groups of Meso and South America, including Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Aztec, Moche, Chimu, and Inca, among  many others. Highlights include a Zapotec urn, a Maya cylinder vase, a Jalisco tomb figure, a ceremonial tumi from the Sican culture, and a metate made of volcanic stone from Costa Rica.

The Native American collection at the Birmingham Museum consists of about 450 objects.  The galleries are organized into cultural groupings according to region: Eastern Woodlands and the Great Lakes, Southeast, Plains, Northwest Coast, and the Southwest.  Highlights of the collection include a large collection of Navajo blankets and rugs, an extensive collection of Northwest Coast art, and important historic and contemporary Pueblo ceramics.  There are also excellent examples of Plains beadwork, including a magnificent Kiowa cradleboard.  Works from the Southeast include a Creek beaded bandolier bag, and Cherokee baskets.

The Museum’s collection of eighteenth-century British paintings is comprised exclusively of portraiture. Works by artists such as Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Gainsborough, and Henry Raeburn, who were skilled at creating psychologically perceptive portraits, reveal the look and spirit of both the aristocracy and the middle class. Clothing, jewelry, and other accessories provide glimpses into the lives of the sitters. These genteel images are often combined with landscapes to create artful compositions of casual elegance.

Although small, this area of the collection includes examples that highlight the quality and diversity of artistic production during the seventeenth century. Many painters specialized in a particular subject, such as landscape, portraiture, still life, church interior, genre, or religious painting. The characteristic common to most of the artists from this period demonstrates a heightened interest in observing the visible world, which produced works that resonate with life.

An exceedingly fine still-life painting by Balthasar van der Ast brings together both rare and commonplace objects rendered in a brilliantly realistic manner, while a rare winter landscape by Jacop van Ruisdael captures the hushed, late-afternoon chill of a Dutch winter day. Elegant portraits by Ferdinand Bol and Jan Mijtens hint at the affluence of merchants. Other subjects of everyday life provide glimpses into various interiors, such as an amorous scene by Jan Steen, a soaring church interior by Peeter Neeffs the Younger, and a vision of domestic tranquility with a woman devoted to a kitchen task. This latter work has been ascribed to no less than five artists, a fascinating example of an outstanding painting without a secure attribution.

Birmingham’s noteworthy collection of Italian art is thanks largely to a generous gift by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation shortly after the Museum was founded in 1951. These thirty-nine paintings and sculptures form the core of the European art collection. With additional gifts and purchases, the Museum is able to provide a survey of Italy’s artistic achievement from the explorations of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the innovations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to the exuberance of seventeenth and eighteenth century production. Several of the works are by celebrated artists of their day, such as Pietro Perugino, Paris Bordon, and Antonio Canaletto. Numerous other works, albeit by lesser-known masters, are among the finest examples of their kind. Paintings more recently added to the collection include a delicate devotional painting by Marco Zoppo, a luminous St. Sebastian by il Bacchiacca, and a dynamic, unfinished work by Giovanni Lanfranco. The disproportionate number of paintings to sculptures is changing, with acquisitions in marble, bronze, and terracotta that augment the visitor’s understanding of artistic practices over the centuries.

In 2009 the Kress Foundation sponsored a photographic campaign at various museums throughout the United States to document the installation of Kress works using panoramic photography. Click here to view four galleries in the Birmingham Museum of Art.