Detail from Pompeo BATONI
 (Italian, 1708-1787)
 Sir Sampson Gideon and
 Unidentified Companion

• Cincinnati Art Museum
27 October 2000 – 14 January 2001

• Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
18March – 26 May 2001

• Denver Art Museum
23 June – 9 September 2001

• Portland Art Museum
6 October 2001 – 6 January 2002

• Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama
10 February 2002 – 14 April 2002

For the first time in the history of the NGV, eighty-eight of the finest European paintings from the collection are being taken off permanent display to travel to four art galleries in the USA. Galleries include the Cincinnatti Art Museum, Ohio, The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Denver Art Museum, Colorado, and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. This major exhibition will show-case the painting collection, reflecting its richness and diversity by showing a breadth of works spanning a significant part of the history of western artistic tradition. Included are works from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries representing a myriad of painting styles from all over Europe.

Works range in scope and style from the intimate Man of Sorrows by Memling, a devotional piece for private contemplation, to the comparatively ostentatious view of Venice by Canaletto. Masterpieces of the golden age of Dutch portraiture by Rembrandt and Thomas de Keyser will also hang with the enigmatic surrealism of Rene Magritte and the confronting abstraction of Francis Bacon and David Hockney. This exhibition will undoubtedly have a strong impact on American audiences.