Michel Sittow. Estonian Painter at the Courts of Renaissance Europe 28/01/2018 – 13/05/2018

From January 28, the joint exhibition by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Art Museum of Estonia entitled Michel Sittow. Estonian Painter at the Courts of Renaissance Europe is open in the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition celebrates the centennial of the Republic of Estonia.

For the first time, the surviving oeuvre of Michel Sittow (ca 1469–1525), a painter from Estonia who became a highly renowned artist in the royal courts of Europe at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, is on display at a solo exhibition. The exhibition also includes the shutters of the Passion Altarpiece from the Art Museum of Estonia – Niguliste Museum.

Michel Sittow’s masterful and detailed paintings are still held in extremely high regard. His oeuvre, which covers a period of about twenty years, is scattered among famous museums around the world: the Louvre, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the National Galleries in London and Washington DC, etc. Several of the master’s paintings have been included in large exhibitions, but until now a solo exhibition of Michel Sittow’s works has never been organised.

An illustrated exhibition catalogue is published together with the opening of the exhibition in the National Gallery of Art, in cooperation with Yale University Press. The catalogue is in English and includes articles of internationally renowned art historians.

The exhibition is part of the international programme of festivities organised in honour of the centennial of the Republic of Estonia, consisting of more than a hundred events all across the world. The foreign exhibition programme of the Art Museum of Estonia began last with the start of the Estonian presidency of the European Union, when the Art Museum of Estonia, in collaboration with Estonia 100, took an exposition of contemporary Estonian art entitled Archaeology of the Screen to the Bozar art centre in Brussels, and a major great exhibition on Konrad Mägi to the Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna e contemporanea in Rome.

The exhibition in the National Gallery of Art will remain open till the13th of May. Afterwards, the exhibition will on view in Kumu Art Museum from 8 June until 16 September 2018.

Visit the exhibition website of the National Gallery of Art.

Visit the website of the exhibition in Kumu Art Museum.

Curators: John Oliver Hand (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), Greta Koppel (Art Museum of Estonia)