This special issue of the Bulletin reflects on some of the crises gripping our world in the present moment, including the catastrophic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuing tragedy of racial injustice. Voices from The Metropolitan Museum of Art present their personal perspectives on issues and challenges facing us all while connecting these difficult times to art, artists, and the Museum’s history. Conceived and written during the Museum’s unprecedented closure, this compelling publication reflects on art’s power to inspire, comfort, and heal.

The first major examination of Anthony van Dyck's work as a portraitist and an essential resource on this aspect of his illustrious career This landmark volume is a comprehensive survey of the portrait drawings, paintings, and prints of Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), one of the most celebrated portraitists of all time. His supremely elegant style and ability to convey a sense of a sitter's inner life made him a favored portraitist among high-ranking figures and royalty across Europe, as well as among his fellow artists and art enthusiasts. Showcasing the full range of Van Dyck's fascinating international career with more than 100 works, this catalogue celebrates the artist's versatility, inventiveness, and influential approach to portraiture. Works include preparatory drawings and oil sketches that shed light on Van Dyck's working process, prints that allowed his work to reach a wider audience, and grand painted portraits. Some of the masterpieces are drawn from the exceptional holdings of The Frick Collection, while other works are presented here for the first time. Also included are drawings by some of Van Dyck's contemporaries--including his teacher Peter Paul Rubens--that illuminate the lineage of his working method. With insightful contributions by a team of international scholars, this unparalleled study of Van Dyck offers a compelling case for the distinctiveness and importance of the artist's work.

Every two years the fall issue of The Met's quarterly Bulletin celebrates notable recent acquisitions and gifts to the collection. Highlights of Recent Acquisitions 2022–2024 include the monumental handscroll painting Streams and Mountains without End, a masterwork by the Qing-dynasty painter Wang Yuanqi; the nineteenth century painting Bélizaire and the Frey Children which offers a rare depiction of an identified Black teenager with the children of his enslaver; Helene Schjerfbeck’s The Lace Shawl, which is a layered, dramatic portrait of the artist’s friend and landlady. Meanwhile, Leopoldo Méndez’s linocut depiction of the great Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada expands the already distinguished collection of twentieth-century Mexican graphic arts in the Department of Drawings and Prints. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of The Met collection.

This timely issue of the Bulletin brings together fourteen voices from across curatorial departments and Met Trustees to consider how artists and cultures throughout history have explored the nature of leadership, interrogated the workings of society, and redefined the ideals of freedom and democracy. The essays in this issue center around one of three different themes: the ways societies are formed through collective collaboration, the symbols of leadership and civilization, and the images of leaders that commemorate, mythologize, or even obscure those who govern. By expanding worldviews and building bridges among disparate experiences, The Met plays a vital part in considering the definition of leadership and what it means to build a society. This volume asserts museums’ roles as keepers of histories and places of reflection and learning. As stewards of five thousand years of art from around the globe, The Met is privileged to preserve, share, and reevaluate the countless stories told by the objects in its collection while connecting them to the present day.

This fascinating new look at the artistic legacy of the Tudors reveals the dynasty’s enduring influence on the arts of Renaissance England and beyond. Ruling successively from 1485 through 1603, the five Tudor monarchs brought seismic changes to England that reverberated throughout Europe. They used the arts to legitimize and glorify their tumultuous rule, from Henry VII’s bloody rise to power, through Henry VIII’s breach with the Roman Catholic Church, to the reign of the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I. With incisive scholarship and sumptuous new photography, this book explores the extreme politics and outsize personalities of the Tudors, and how they used art in their diplomacy at home and abroad. Tudor courts were truly cosmopolitan, attracting top artists and artisans from across Europe. At the same time, the Tudors nurtured local talent and gave rise to a distinctly English aesthetic, one that is forever connected to the myth and visual legacy of their dynasty. The Tudors reveals the true history behind a family that has long captured the public imagination, bringing to life their extravagant and politically precarious world through the exquisite paintings, lush textiles, gleaming metalwork, and countless luxury objects that adorned their spectacular courts.

This absorbing monograph is the first to detail the captivating life and oeuvre of the Dutch artist Gesina ter Borch. Gesina ter Borch (1631–1690), a Dutch watercolorist and draftswoman—and the younger half-sister of painter Gerard ter Borch (1617–1681)—is one of the most well-known women artists of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Her oeuvre is securely attributed and thoroughly catalogued, with three albums of her watercolors and calligraphy known today; surprisingly, though, she has never been the subject of an independent monograph or sustained discussion. This volume is the first to highlight her watercolors and calligraphy in their own right, alongside documentation of her work as an art teacher, archivist, and artist’s model. Adam Eaker revisits Ter Borch’s role during the genesis of Dutch “high-life” genre painting and, in doing so, examines the construction of gender and social classes by comparing her art with that of her brother. In this monograph, Eaker questions a historiography of women’s art that frequently valorizes painting over other media and values work for the market over “amateur” production. Gesina ter Borch offers a fascinating exploration of Ter Borch’s life and work and a more nuanced understanding of the ideologies and achievements of Dutch genre painting.

A new account of painting in early modern England centered on the art and legacy of Anthony van Dyck As a courtier, figure of fashion, and object of erotic fascination, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) transformed the professional identities available to English artists. By making his portrait sittings into a form of courtly spectacle, Van Dyck inspired poets and playwrights at the same time that he offended guardians of traditional hierarchies. A self-consciously Van Dyckian lineage of artists, many of them women, extends from his lifetime to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. Recovering the often surprising responses of both writers and painters to Van Dyck's portraits, this book provides an alternative perspective on English art's historical self-consciousness. Built around a series of close readings of artworks and texts ranging from poems and plays to early biographies and studio gossip, it traces the reception of Van Dyck's art on the part of artists like Mary Beale, William Hogarth, and Richard and Maria Cosway to bestow a historical specificity on the frequent claim that Van Dyck founded an English school of portraiture.