Browse by Period | Early European Art

The Milwaukee Art Museum officially launched its collection of early European art in 1957 when the Board of Trustees made a commitment to enlarge the scope of the Museum’s Collection with the grand opening of the new Milwaukee Art Center.

Francisco Zurbarán’s St. Francis of Assisi in His Tomb was one of the first works acquired for the new Museum. Today, the Milwaukee Art Museum boasts rich holdings of 17th-century Dutch painting, 18th-century French painting and Sèvres porcelain, and 18th-century English portraiture. Notable among the collections are a 16th-century Brabant-Brussels tapestry, Nardo di Cione’s Madonna and Child, a Dutch Caravaggesque painting by Mathias Stom, a Shepherdess by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and an engaging portrait of a little girl by Francis Cotes.

The Richard and Erna Flagg Collection of European decorative arts and sculpture represents one of the most significant collections of European decorative arts in an American museum. The Flagg Collection today forms the core of the Museum’s recently reinstalled Renaissance Treasury with more than 125 outstanding examples of Renaissance decorative arts, sculpture and German Renaissance clocks. The collection of clocks is considered the best in any North American museum.

Dürer, Albrecht
Melancholia I

Unknown, Flemish
Refusing the Gifts of the Samnites

Rugendas, Nikolaus, the Elder
Table Clock in the Form of a Monstrance

Callot, Jacques
La foire de l’Impruneta (The Fair at Impruneta--first plate)

Garthorne, George; Made for the Royal African Company
Monteith

Cotes, Francis
Portrait of Miss Frances Lee

Nardo di Cione
Madonna and Child

Swart van Groningen, Jan
Triptych: Moses and the Tables of the Law / Josiah and the Book of the Law

Anguissola, Sofonisba
Portrait of the Artist’s Sister Minerva

Unknown, Flemish or Southern German
Nautilus Cup

Zurbarán, Francisco de
Saint Francis of Assisi in His Tomb

Stom, Matthias
Christ Before the High Priest

Champaigne, Philippe de
Moses Presenting the Tablets of the Law

Hyrschöttel, Ludwig
Table Clock with Astronomical and Calendar Dials

Fragonard, Jean-Honoré
The Shepherdess

Unknown, Russian
Portable Iconostasis