The has announced two new acquisitions – a rare Mexican folding screen, and a Impressionist landscape of Puerto Rico, both of which will be on view as a part of the traveling exhibit “Behind Closed Doors: Power and Privilege in the Spanish American Home.”
The viceroy of New Spain commissioned the mother-of-pearl-inlaid screen in 1700, and at the time of the museum’s acquisition, was the only recorded surviving shell-inlaid folding screen, or biombo enconchado, that remained in private hands.
The funds for the purchase of the screen came from the proceeds of the sale of Vasily Vereshchagin's Crucifixion by the Romans (1887), which sold last November at Christie's London for nearly $2.7 million.
At the Brooklyn Museum are six of the twelve panels, with the other half of the screen residing at the Museo Nacional del Virreinato in Tepotzotlán, Mexico.
Also purchased with funds from the sale of the Vereshchagin painting and coming soon to the museum is Hacienda La Fortuna (1885), an Impressionist landscape of southern Puerto Rico by Francisco M. Oller, one of the most important Puerto Rican painters of his era.
Beginning June 6, Oller's take on the Puerto Rican industrial landscape will be on view in the Museum's European gallery alongside paintings by fellow avant-garde artists Courbet, Pissarro, and Claude Monet. Hacienda La Fortuna will later join the shell-inlaid Mexican folding screen in the “Behind Closed Doors” exhibition when it opens in September.
