Meadows Museum
Encyclopedia
The Meadows Museum is a museum in Dallas
Dallas, Texas
Dallas is the third-largest city in Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the largest metropolitan area in the South and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States...

, USA. A division of the Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University is a private university in Dallas, Texas, United States. Founded in 1911 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, SMU operates campuses in Dallas, Plano, and Taos, New Mexico. SMU is owned by the South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church...

 Meadows School of the Arts
Meadows School of the Arts
The Meadows School of the Arts is an art institute in Southern Methodist University, University Park, Texas, USA. It is known for its professional music, dance, theatre, art, art history, arts administration, and advertising programs, as well as its cinema, journalism, media, and public relations...

, houses one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain, with works dating from the 10th to the 20th century. It includes masterpieces by some of the world's greatest painters: El Greco
El Greco
El Greco was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his ethnic Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος .El Greco was born on Crete, which was at...

, Velázquez
Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period, important as a portrait artist...

, Ribera, Murillo
Bartolomé Estéban Murillo
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was a Spanish Baroque painter. Although he is best known for his religious works, Murillo also produced a considerable number of paintings of contemporary women and children...

, Goya, Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...

, Sorolla, and Picasso. Highlights of the Meadows Collection include Renaissance altarpieces, monumental Baroque canvases, exquisite rococo oil sketches, polychrome wood sculptures, Impressionist landscapes, modernist abstractions, a comprehensive collection of the graphic works of Goya, and a select group of sculptures by major twentieth-century masters - Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...

, Maillol, Giacometti, Moore
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....

, Smith
David Smith (sculptor)
David Roland Smith was an American Abstract Expressionist sculptor and painter, best known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures.-Biography:...

, and Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...

. The University Art Collection, also administered by the museum, includes works by leading artists of the region - Frank Reaugh
Frank Reaugh
Charles Franklin Reaugh , known as Frank Reagh, was an artist, photographer, inventor, patron of the arts, and teacher, who was called the "Dean of Texas Painters". He devoted his career to the visual documentation in pastel and paint, portraying the vast, still unsettled regions of the Great...

, Jerry Bywaters, Otis Dozier, Alexandre Hogue
Alexandre Hogue
Alexandre Hogue was an American artist active during the 1930s through the 1960s. He is a realist painter associated with the Dallas Nine; the majority of his works focus on Southwestern and Midwestern landscapes during the Dust Bowl.-Biography:Hogue was born on February 22, 1898 in Memphis,...

, and William Lester.

In 1965, the Meadows Museum opened its doors to the public for the first time. The museum's collection of Spanish art and the galleries for its display were a gift to Southern Methodist University from Algur Hurtle Meadows, a Dallas businessman and founder of the General American Oil Company of Texas. During the 1950s business took Meadows frequently to Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

, where repeated visits to the Prado Museum inspired what would become a lasting interest in the art of Spain's Golden Age
Spanish Golden Age
The Spanish Golden Age is a period of flourishing in arts and literature in Spain, coinciding with the political rise and decline of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty. El Siglo de Oro does not imply precise dates and is usually considered to have lasted longer than an actual century...

. By 1962, Meadows had amassed his own collection of Spanish paintings, which became the foundation of the Museum's collection. After the opening of the museum raised doubts about the quality of some of these works, Meadows initiated a new phase of collecting, from 1967-1978, during which the core of the present collection was formed.

Since 1978, the museum's efforts to develop and care for the collection have continued with the support of The Meadows Foundation, a general purpose philanthropic institution created and incorporated by Algur Meadows in 1948. This fruitful partnership has resulted in a comprehensive campaign of conservation, the support of scholarly research of the collection, and a number of important acquisitions, particularly in the areas of medieval, Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

, and 20th century art.

The museum's currently occupies a neo-Palladian structure with impressive naturally lit painting galleries and extensive exhibition space, underwritten by a generous grant from The Meadows Foundation. The Meadows Museum is located off North Central Expressway at 5900 Bishop Blvd., three blocks west of Mockingbird Station
Mockingbird Station
Mockingbird is a DART Light Rail station located in north Dallas, Texas at Mockingbird Lane and North Central Expressway . It opened in January 1997 and is a station on the , and Lines, serving the Mockingbird Station residential and retail development and nearby Southern Methodist...

.

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