Taking up two floors of the Woodstock Street Gallery between June 21 and July 26, 1991, Hirst’s first solo exhibition comprised a room of live butterflies and an installation titled Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays. Today, the permanent half of that iconic installation is part of the Center’s collection—featuring eight paintings in bright pastel colors, each with dead butterflies pressed into their surfaces of high gloss paint; four ashtrays loaded with cigarette butts on a table; and four large cubes, each with a hole on every side.
Among the other highlights that will be on view in the Center’s third-floor galleries are Henry Fuseli’s tragic Dido, first shown at the Royal Academy in 1781; Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding’s sublime celebration of nature in A Scene on the Coast, Merionethshire—Storm Passing Off (1818); Angelica Kauffman’s hymn to love in Rinaldo and Armida (1771); and Christopher Le Brun’s poetic meditation on beauty in Kingdom (2015).
Henry Fuseli, Dido, 1781. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Angelica Kauffmann, Rinaldo and Armida, 1771. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.