European Art

The High Museum of Art’s European art collection represents centuries of artistic achievement. In a time before mass media and widespread literacy, art served as a form of communication. The High’s collection of more than 900 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper spans the 1300s through the 1900s and traces the development of religion, scientific discovery, and social change as reflected in the continent’s visual culture.

In 1958, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation donated what became the core of the High’s European art collection. The Kress Collection includes Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child, Vittore Carpaccio’s Prudence and Temperance, and other artworks from Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Since 1960, the High has acquired Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Émile Bernard, and others.

The High’s significant European print holdings, displayed on a rotating basis, include work ranging from Albrecht Dürer’s sixteenth-century engravings to a complete edition of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Elles lithographs portfolio.

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Claudia Einecke,

Claudia Einecke

Frances B. Bunzl Family Curator of European Art