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10 February – 29 April 2012
We’ve all dreamt of riding on a golden sleigh pulled by four white horses. Now just such a vehicle, possibly the most valuable sleigh in the world and once the property of the Empress Maria Theresia, comes to Zurich. The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, features over a hundred objects and images that reveal why winter was artists’ favourite season.
With everything from burlesque Dutch scenes of fun on ice to frolics in a warm alcove bed, fur-clad courtesans to shivering farmers’ children, carnivals and Lenten fare, winter sun and snow flurries, no other season offers such a rich variety of artistic ideas in all fields, from applied art and painting to sculpture.
Exquisite pictures from the 16th and 17th centuries, full-length tapestries originally intended for palaces, cabinet pieces of gold and ivory – an entertaining and informative tour guides visitors through four hundred years of arts and crafts with winter as their subject, from Breughel and the Dutch masters to the delicate whimsy of salon painting and the luminous masterpieces of Impressionism from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Supported by Zurich Insurance Company Ltd. as well as by the Truus and Gerrit van Riemsdijk Foundation.
