UPDATE: While the exhibition has closed (temporarily) due to COVID-19, the curators have written a piece about the exhibition and its closure for CODART.
From 10 March 2020 to 7 June 2020 the exhibition Lucas Gassel of Helmond. Master of Landscapes will be on view in Museum Helmond/Kunsthal Helmond. For three months, Lucas Gassel’s core oeuvre, consisting of paintings, drawings and prints made after his design, will be brought together, from all over the world. This has never been done before.
The exhibition will introduce visitors to a sixteenth-century artist who may be largely unknown today, but whose masterful landscapes and other original compositions made an important contribution to the development of Netherlandish (landscape) painting. Works by his contemporaries will place Gassel’s oeuvre in its artistic, religious, and political context. For this occasion, many international loans will be travelling to Helmond. Lenders include renowned European and North-American museums of Old Masters: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; Narodní Galerie, Prague; Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels; Musée du Louvre, Paris; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht and Museo Soumaya, Mexico City. Also on display will be works from private collections from the Netherlands and abroad.
Lucas Gassel (c. 1488-1568/69) is one of the earliest artists who specialized in painting landscapes. Originally from Helmond, in the north of the duchy of Brabant, Gassel according to Van Mander worked in Brussels, where he also died, around the same year as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, his Brabantine-compatriot.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a scholarly catalogue (in Dutch). For more information, please visit: https://lucasgassel.museumhelm