This exhibition spans over 400 years of art history and is dedicated to many of the most famous artists of the western tradition, including Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1699), Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828), Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). The single idea uniting these masters (and the idea providing the theme for this exhibition) is the originality with which they re-created visual reality, re-casting the raw facts of appearance with the eccentricities and mannerisms of their own intensely personal styles.

In the etchings of Rembrandt, for example, figures are seen through a haze of darkness which lends an air of religious solemnity to his biblical narratives. This dark, chiaroscuro realism influenced generations of Dutch artists, many of whom like Philips Wouverman (1619-1668) and Adrian van Ostade (1610-1685) are included in this exhibition. But in the works of such English painters of the nineteenth century as John Constable (1776-1837) and Richard Parkes Bonington, we see a greater concentration on the luminous interaction of light and atmosphere with landscape. Without exception, the subject matter of these works derives from visual reality and is grounded in traditional subjects like portraiture, genre, and landscape. The exhibition concentrates on such formal characteristics as light, color, perspective or line which lends a sense of the artist’s own stylistic "signature" and identifies a work’s aesthetic character.
  

The paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), in contrast, often depict the dissolution of solid matter into abstract, turbulent streams of atmosphere flooded with light and color. Albert Bierstadt, however, exaggerates the majesty and grandeur of the American wilderness, hoping to give form and substance to the invisible forces which, he believed, animate nature. Barbizon painters like Charles-Emile Jacques (1813-1874) and Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de la Pena (1808-1876) replicated nature with near fidelity and in so doing introduced the broken brushwork and the intense color combinations that soon became the hallmark of the Impressionist movement.