What’s better than viewing iconic works from our collections? Perhaps it’s seeing outstanding objects on loan to the Harvard Art Museums from prestigious peer institutions.  

Over the past few years, we have been fortunate to exchange high-profile art with a number of other museums. These reciprocal loan arrangements often come about through peer institutions’ requests to borrow works from our collections for use in special exhibitions. In some of those cases, the Harvard Art Museums have an opportunity to borrow a work from the requesting institution. The result is a treat for our galleries—and our visitors.

In our latest “swap,” we lent one of our most famous paintings, Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin (1888), to the exhibition Van Gogh & Japan, organized by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition has been lauded for the way it explores the Dutch artist’s fascination with Japanese art, despite his never having set foot in Japan.

In return, the Van Gogh Museum lent the Harvard Art Museums Van Gogh’s painting Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet) (1890). He painted the landscape after French artist Jean-François Millet, whose work he greatly admired. Snow-Covered Field will be on view in Gallery 2700 through July 11. (Be sure to check our calendar for upcoming gallery talks and a lecture focused on the painting.)

Besides being a visually arresting painting in shades of blue and violet, Snow-Covered Field helps the museums present a side of Van Gogh’s work that had not previously been shown in our galleries. “We don’t have a pure Van Gogh landscape painting,” said A. Cassandra Albinson, the Margaret S. Winthrop Curator of European Art, who helped arrange the exchange. “This was a chance to secure one for our viewers.”

In addition, showing the work allows us “to teach visitors about Van Gogh’s late career,” she said. In fact, at the time the famously troubled artist painted Snow-Covered Field, he was a patient at a health clinic in southern France. In hopes of helping him regain inspiration, Van Gogh’s brother Theo sent him a black-and-white print based on Millet’s Winter (The Plain of Chailly). One example of a Millet pastel of the same subject is part of the Harvard Art Museums’ collections—and is now being shown next to Van Gogh’s interpretation. It is possible that Van Gogh saw this very pastel in Paris, earlier in his career, Albinson said. The side-by-side presentation adds important context to the artist’s painting and may prompt visitors to ponder the relationship between the two works.

“Van Gogh’s touch and personal attack on the canvas makes you think about what he is trying to say and wonder why he goes to all that effort . . . to reinterpret another artist’s work,” said Albinson in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. “But I don’t think we need to feel any pressure to understand exactly what he is trying to say, and that’s one of the most interesting things to me about his work. It evokes a very special feeling that in turn gives you a set of questions to grapple with.”

Meanwhile, the museums’ work The Blind Man, by Picasso, is now hanging in the Wertheim Gallery (Gallery 1220) until Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait is reinstalled on June 11. This 1903 watercolor—rarely shown due to its sensitivity to light—is part of the landmark collection that was assembled by Maurice Wertheim (Harvard Class of 1906) and bequeathed to the Harvard Art Museums. Picasso created the drawing during his Blue Period, in which he worked primarily in monochromatic shades of blue, depicting somber scenes.  

Institutional exchanges like the Van Gogh swap are “a reminder that the permanent collections galleries are not at all permanent,” said Ethan Lasser, head of the Division of European and American Art and the Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. Curator of American Art. “You can change out one work and everything in the room looks different.”

It’s also important to note that these exchanges aren’t an everyday occurrence at the museums, and even in the case of high-profile loans, it’s not always possible to facilitate a swap. Sometimes we lend works without a reciprocal arrangement, simply because we believe in the borrowing exhibition’s goals and want our objects to contribute to new scholarship resulting from the project. In that case, even a seemingly one-way arrangement helps advance our mission.

See below for two more noteworthy examples of recent swaps and the remarkable works of art our visitors have been able to experience as a result.

In the spring and summer of 2017, the Harvard Art Museums loaned François Boucher’s portrait Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, above left, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., for its exhibition America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting. In exchange, the National Gallery loaned Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Young Girl Reading, above right, to the museums.

The Harvard Art Museums loaned Jean Frédéric Bazille’s painting Summer Scene (Bathers), above left, to the touring exhibition Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism, which was on display from 2016 to 2017 at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In exchange, the Musée d’Orsay loaned Winslow Homer’s Summer Night, above right, to the museums.