Masterpieces from Turner to Cezanne: this was "a crucial moment in the history of art, when European painting was undergoing a revolution in style, theme, and technique.".

• Position: Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales - Museums Today

THE EXHIBITION "Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales" features more than 50 works--most of which never have been on view in the U.S.--including masterpieces by Paul Cezanne, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Honore Daumier, Augustus John, Edouard Manet, Jean-Francois Millet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissaro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, J.M.W. Turner, and Vincent van Gogh.

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The works have been drawn exclusively from the extraordinary collection of the Davies sisters, Gwendoline and Margaret, who actively sought to collect canvases that reflected the major movements of the time. The pair collected during a crucial moment in the history of art, when European painting was undergoing a revolution in style, theme, and technique. The exhibition traces the evolution of early modem art, beginning with examples of dramatic Romanticism exemplified by Turner through the expressionist Post-Impressionism of Van Gogh. Spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the exhibit contains masterworks of Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism by their greatest exponents.

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"This exhibition makes important links between the development of Western art and the stories of those who collected it," notes Beatrice Gralton, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery. "In this case, the stories of Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, the wealthy granddaughters of a Welsh industrialist, who chose to spend their inherited for tune on developing an extraordinary art collection, are inextricably linked to the works. They were local in concern but international in their vision. Collecting art appears to be an interest pursued by the sisters as a means to connecting to an alternate world, in a quiet--yet hugely influential--manner."

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Works on view include Joseph Mallord William Turner's "The Storm" (c. 1843); Millet's dramatic "The Gust of Wind" (1871-73); Renoir's "La Parisienne" (1874), a figure who represents the era's shifting sense of modernity; Van Gogh's "Rain-Auvers" (1890), completed just weeks prior to the artist ending his own life; and Cezanne's once-controversial "The Francois Zola Dam" (1877-78).

Turner's "The Storm," purchased by Margaret Davies in 1908, was the first of the artist's oil...