Brooklyn Museum Announces Acquisitions and Gifts
January 3 2022
Picture: Brooklyn Museum
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Brooklyn Museum in New York City have announced the nearly 500 acquisitions and gifts it has received between October 2020 and October 2021.
On the old masters front, the most significant acquisition is a Portrait of a Man of African Descent c.1600, by an 'unknown artist (probably Venetian)'. The work was acquired through the William K. Jacobs Jr. Fund and the Dorward Fund.
According to the museum's press release:
This painting is a rare and compelling portrait of an as-yet-unidentified Black man. With none of the typical signifiers of servitude, this individualized portrayal opens up inclusive narratives about the presence of Black people in early modern Europe—some having arrived as pilgrims or members of diplomatic retinues, with many more brought as a result of the intensifying European slave trade in Africa. It is a powerful and urgent visual intervention among the Museum’s other works from seventeenth-century Europe, which is often perceived and presented as an almost exclusively white milieu.
