The works featured in this exhibition are a lively, arresting, and timely celebration of ten Philadelphia artists, ranging in age from 25 to 50, who are currently making art on paper.

This exhibition reunites, for the first time since 1656, seven paintings of Jesus by Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn. Abandoning traditional sources, Rembrandt created these exceedingly rare portraits of Christ with the use of a human model--a step which was totally unprecedented at the time. In viewing them today, visitors are presented with a number of religious, historic, and artistic questions to ponder.

Drawn from the Museum’s rich collection of menswear, this exhibition focuses on one of Philadelphia’s most important industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: tailoring. Francis Toscani (1915–1973), one of the city’s most successful tailors, is featured, with over fifteen of the designer’s innovative garments on view.

Unsettled: Photography and Politics in Contemporary Art presents work by nine artists who used photography to address some of the most controversial political and social issues of the late 1970s through the early 1990s, including feminism, racism, the AIDS crisis, and gay activism.

Baltimore native Alfred Jacob Miller (1810–1874), one of the first American artists to paint the Far West, is best remembered for his vivid chronicles of the Western fur trade and his romanticized depictions of mountain men, American Indian subjects, exotic wildlife, and the region’s stunning topography.

Men’s apparel is often thought of as staid and restrained, especially when compared to feminine fashions. Until the late eighteenth century, however, elite men flaunted their social position with rich fabrics and ornamentation. After men generally adopted somber suits, colorful accessories could add spice, and more ostentatious masculine flash and flair was sometimes permissible. The Peacock Male, drawn from the Museum’s collection of Western fashion, examines three hundred years of men’s sartorial display.

The Kangxi emperor, who ruled China from 1662 to 1722, was a connoisseur of the arts who took a particular interest in ceramics. In the 1680s, he ordered the reactivation of the imperial porcelain factory at Jingdezhen; by the end of his reign there were more than three thousand workshops producing wares for the imperial court as well as for China’s thriving domestic and export markets. Porcelain for the Emperor showcases the extraordinary technical and aesthetic achievements of the Kangxi-era potters.

In the mid 1950s, William H. Helfand began to collect prints with medical subjects, gradually moving his focus from fine to popular art. Over four decades, he has donated more than one thousand posters, prints, and ephemera to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This exhibition presents some fifty of the nearly two hundred posters in this collection.

This concise exhibition presents nine examples of English embroidery from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, from opulent examples made for ecclesiastical and secular use, to embroideries used as subtle displays of wealth and status, to reflections of contemporary social and aesthetic developments.

Clay used in artistic expression dates back to the dawn of civilization. In the past three centuries, artists from the United States have contributed to this rich ceramic tradition with vibrant, original and intelligent expressions in clay. Varied forms, surface decoration, use of glaze for color combined with science and skill shows the full breadth of possibilities as demonstrated by this selection of ceramics from the Museum's collection.

As a symbol of culture, freedom, and modernity, the city of Paris held a magnetic attraction for artists from Eastern Europe during the early decades of the twentieth century. The exhibition will focus in particular on the paintings that Marc Chagall made between 1910 and 1920, including the artist’s early masterpiece Half-Past Three (The Poet), of 1911, which has long been considered one of the great treasures of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In Renaissance Italy, betrothal and marriage were celebrated with a variety of events as well as commemorative works of art. Often elaborate, these objects marked the joining of a couple while symbolizing wealth and demonstrating alliances between powerful families.

Italian fashion designer and artist Roberto Capucci (born 1930) is revered by contemporary designers for his innovative silhouettes and masterful use of form, color, and materials. This exhibition—featuring over eighty works, as well as original drawings and sketches—will be the first survey of his work in the United States.

A canonical figure in American painting, George Inness (1825–1894) is widely admired as the pioneer of the evocative aesthetic known as Tonalism, which is distinguished by soft focus and diaphanous layers of paint. This is the first exhibition to examine the artist’s two Italian sojourns (1851–52 and 1870–74) and their formative impact on his work. Italy—its art and its landscape—offered Inness a font of inspiration as he developed his own unique artistic vision.

The earliest surviving portraits of an African American couple, Hiram and Elizabeth Brown Montier, provide a first-person perspective on their lives in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. On public view for the first time while on long-term loan to the Museum, the portraits invite special consideration as documents of marriage and family life within the city’s free African American community.

Drawing from the Museum’s collection, Monumental "Miniatures" features a selection of paintings dating from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries. With highlights including an elaborate storytelling scroll from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and a sumptuous depiction of Krishna and his beloved, Radha, from Kishangarh in the western state of Rajasthan, this exhibition explores the great regional and thematic diversity of India’s tradition of large-scale painting.

A Glimpse of Paradise explores the unique status of gold in Islam through a small group of objects drawn from the Museum’s collection. The diverse selection includes a fourteenth-century Qur’an folio from Central Asia or Turkey with gold decoration added in India and a resplendent eagle-shaped pendant made in Iran during the nineteenth century. As these works show, gold was put to multiple uses in the arts of Islam, serving both as a sign of the divine and as an ornament for earthly pleasure.

Alessi is widely regarded as the world’s most innovative and influential maker of kitchen utensils, or in the company’s parlance, “house-hold objects.” Alessi: Ethical and Radical presents the company’s history in objects while exploring ecological concerns, new technologies, and other themes.

A Royal Passion, which celebrates the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Meissen factory, features nineteen pieces of porcelain from the Japanese Palace collection and highlights a pair of goats from the Museum’s permanent collection that was originally intended for Augustus’s porcelain menagerie.

As the political climate in Philadelphia grew increasingly charged throughout the 1770s, art became currency. This presentation allows Museum visitors to see the featured works of art through the lens of a truly seminal period in American history—to consider the unexpected roles art played in the lives of individuals and families during the American Revolution.

Drawn from the Museum's permanent collection, this exhibition features approximately 50 objects depicting symbolic interpretations of particular plants and animals—from mythical creatures such as dragons and phoenixes to the four friends; plums, orchids, chrysanthemums, and bamboo.

This exhibition surveys a select group of some fifty of Mark Cohen’s black-and-white and color photographs made over the past forty years. Together, these pictures chart the transformations that have happened in cities such as Scranton and Wilkes-Barre in those decades, demonstrating that even the most subjective photographs can reveal historical truths.

This exhibition brings together a group of lively moralizing prints created between 1550 and 1600 in Antwerp and Haarlem, the two major print-publishing centers in the Low Countries. Both sobering and satirical, prints of this type were popular best-sellers, offering both moral instruction and visual delight to a newly expanded audience of educated Dutch and Flemish consumers.

Live Cinema/In the Round features the works of Ziad Antar, Inci Eviner, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hassan Khan, Maha Maamoun, and Christodoulos Panayiotou, six artists from the Eastern Mediterranean who, in varying ways, explore how the moving image informs representations of reality. Responding to the 'live' reference used in the program title Live Cinema, video and sculptural works create a dialogue around the shift from the live performance of theatre to the suspension of reality of cinema.

In 1660, the Antwerp artist and court painter David Teniers II (1610–1690) published the Theatrum Pictorium, the first illustrated printed catalogue of a major paintings collection. This opulent book contained etchings that reproduced 243 paintings in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the governor of the Southern Netherlands. The selection of paintings highlighted the archduke’s sixteenth-century Venetian masterpieces, largely acquired from the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, who had perished in the English Civil Wars (1642–51).

From classical Noh theater to poetry competitions to the joys of fishing, the pleasures and pastimes depicted in Japanese art are many and varied. This exhibition features masks and gorgeous costumes of the Noh theater as well as libretti and musical instruments that accompany the Noh performances.

This exhibition presents Michelangelo Pistoletto’s current work from his interdisciplinary laboratory, Cittadellarte—the name of which implies both a fortified enclave and a city of art. Examples of Pistoletto’s tables in the shapes of seas from across the globe will be on view. These “mediterranean” tables metaphorically represent the spaces that exist in the “middle of land,” places whose in-between character provides a conceptual platform for conversation and exchange across cultures.

Michelangelo Pistoletto (Italian, born 1933) is widely recognized in Europe as one of its most influential contemporary artists and is increasingly gaining recognition in the United States. As the artist’s first focused survey in the U.S. in more than two decades, Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956–1974 places Pistoletto’s work in the context of the postwar sociocultural transformations of Italy, Western Europe, and North America while also exploring its relationship to Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art.

Acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2007 after a stirring public campaign to keep the painting in Philadelphia, Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) of 1875, has been cleaned and restored for the first time in almost fifty years. The painting emerges from the conservation studio as the centerpiece of this exhibition, which throws new light on a work acclaimed as the greatest American painting of the nineteenth century.