This year, the Taft offers some new twists on old Christmas favorites. Upon entering the galleries, visitors will find an intricately folded paper dollhouse home to miniature paper dolls. Nearby, a collection of antique Noah's Ark toys feature a host of animals, lined up two by two. Once in the historic house, children of all ages will enjoy seeing a German miniature toy shop from the 1890s full of boxed play-sets of sheep, shepherds, and dogs. Among the other vintage treasures new to the display are a tree decked with angel ornaments, another featuring butterfly and flower ornaments, a case full of figural light bulbs for Christmas decor, a display of whimsical Italian glass ornaments from the 1940s and 50s, and eight looped rows of glass bead garlands on the large feather tree in the Music Room.

In the Keystone Gallery, discover The Colors of Christmas: Victorian Paper Decorations. See a dazzling display of the favorite craft material of the Victorian era—chromolithographic scraps. These brilliantly colored, shiny, printed Christmas cutouts were the stickers of their day, inspiring 19th- and early 20th-century homemade ornaments and decorations. Visitors will see a number of examples of these lovely and luminous "scraps."

Sponsor

Fine Arts Fund Partner
P&G

Santa Carrying Children, Toys, and Two Trees,
19th century, chromolithographic die-cut paper.
Collection of Pam and Jim Thomas

For those who feel a secret empathy with Scrooge and the Grinch, the Taft offers an antidote to Yuletide’s good cheer this winter. The full set of Francisco Goya’s 80 haunting images from Los Caprichos (“The Whims” or “The Fantasies,” published in 1799) confront human hypocrisy, pretense, fear, and irrationality, picturing them in every conceivable form. Goya’s singularly original visions of monsters, specters, corpses, and other bitter or callous beings enact challenges to authority of all kinds, including that of the church and state.

Los Caprichos are likely the great Spanish artist’s most influential works and continue to inspire artists to this day. As both prints and images, they are decades ahead of their time. In them, Goya pioneered astonishingly innovative etching techniques, visual forms, and artistic themes, anticipating the later movements known as Realism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Surrealism.

The etchings on view are from an early first edition, one of four sets acquired directly from Goya, and belong now to an American private collector. The exhibition is organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions. Goya (1746–1826) is one of the world’s greatest artists, as famous for portraits that seemingly penetrate his sitters’ souls as he is for portrayals of the brutality of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain (1808–14). The Taft Museum of Art owns an important oil portrait by Goya, Queen Maria Luisa of Spain, of about 1800.

Sponsor
Docents of the Taft Museum of Art

Fine Arts Fund Partner
P&G

Francisco José de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. (Caprichos, no. 43: El sueño de la razon produce monstruos.), 1796-1797, etching and aquatint.
First edition, 1799. Gift of George W. Davison

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American impressionist painters turned their attention to the garden, finding it an ideal subject for the study of light and color in landscape. They were not alone. Appreciated for their variations of form, color, style, and silhouette, gardens constituted a key cultural interest of the period. The vogue for gardening expressed itself in the birth of garden clubs, horticultural and hobbyist publications, the establishment of civic and private gardens, and new modes of garden design. The relationship between the gardening movement and the fine arts of painting and sculpture is the focus of this exhibition, which is organized by the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee.

Bringing together brilliantly colored paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the exhibition features 40 pictures of European and American gardens created by American impressionists and four bronze sculptures for gardens by American sculptors. From Giverny to Boston and Charleston, American painters captured the sensuous pleasures to be found in gardens, ornamenting their canvases with lush blossoms in fuchsia, persimmon, and daffodil yellow. Some celebrated American artists included in the exhibition are John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Gari Melchers, Ernest Lawson, and Frederick Frieseke.

Fine Arts Fund Partner
P&G

Childe Hassam, Reading, 1888, oil on panel. Hunter Museum of American Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. R.B. Davenport, III

Seven Windows, Louis Comfort Tiffany, about 1902, leaded stained glass.
Exhibition organized by In Company with Angels. Photography by Douglas A. Lockard

Seven eight-foot-high stained-glass lancet windows represent seven angels, the whole created by Louis Comfort Tiffany in the late 1890s as a commission for a Swedenborgian church in Cincinnati. In 1903 Louis Comfort Tiffany and his studio completed and installed a set of seven figurative windows in the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem at the corner of Oak Street and Winslow Avenue in Cincinnati. The church was demolished in 1964 to make for Interstate 71, and parishioners saved the windows, storing them in various locations throughout Ohio. In 1991, they were purchased for the Swedenborgian church at Temonos, near Philadelphia. They are on a national tour to help pay for their conservation and upkeep.

The windows are exquisite examples of Tiffany’s glass art. Tiffany revived old medieval and Renaissance methods of glass painting and invented many new techniques of working with glass: making opalescent, rolled, textured, and flashed glass, among other methods. The windows embody the American Renaissance, a blossoming of the arts and decorative arts between 1876, the year of the American centennial, and 1914. Further, as a site-specific installation for a Cincinnati church, they belong to the history of our region.

This exhibition is organized by In Company with Angels, Inc.

Fine Arts Fund Partner
P&G