Museum paintings sought after in the U.S., abroad

Almost daily, the staff of the Michele and Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts receives calls or e-mails from people seeking more information about works of art they have seen in the galleries here in Springfield. More and more, however, we hear from people who have never traveled to Springfield but who have viewed works from our collection in major exhibitions across the country and internationally.

Over the last 75 years, the collection has attracted world-wide attention, and the D'Amour Museum has been a generous lender, recording thousands of loans to museums around the globe. Since 2000, more than 5 million people have seen works from our collection in exhibitions around the world, and this figure grows by hundreds of thousands every year. Annually, the museum considers between 20 to 30 loan requests.

Many of these requests arrive years before an exhibition takes place and often involve intense negotiations. The Winslow Homer painting "Promenade on the Beach," one of the stars of our American painting collection, is requested for loan at least twice a year. Yet, the painting has traveled only 14 times since it arrived in the museum in 1936. The painting has hung on the gallery walls of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Boston of Museum of Fine Arts and the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, Austria.

We are selective about where to send the painting because many of our visitors travel to Springfield specifically to view the Homer masterpiece. When the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia requested the canvas for a small but important show on maritime paintings by Homer, they confirmed the importance of the work by offering to exchange their rarely lent painting "The Family," by Mary Cassatt, during the period that "Promenade on the Beach" was to be displayed. While on view in Virginia for three months, "Promenade on the Beach" was seen by more than 30,000 enthusiastic people....