The Cultivated Connoisseur: Works on Paper

from the Creighton Gilbert Bequest

Exhibition Website

- Jun 4 2017

Creighton Eddy Gilbert (1924-2011) was a renowned art historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance and was one of the foremost authorities on Michelangelo. He received his bachelor of art degree from New York University in 1942 and eventually earned his doctorate there in 1955. After teaching for a few years at Indiana University in Bloomington, he served as a curator at the Ringling Museums in Sarasota, Florida, as a professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and as a professor at Queens College in Flushing, New York. 

In 1967, Gilbert left for a position at Harvard University, then taught at Cornell University before joining the faculty of Yale University in 1981. The prior year, he was named the editor-in-chief of Art Bulletin, one of the leading journals of art historical research, and he remained in the position until 1985. Gilbert published extensively during his career, including the important texts Michelangelo: On and Of the Sistine Ceiling (1994) and Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (1995).

In 2005, Dr. Eric Lee, then-director of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, encouraged Gilbert to leave his private collection to the museum. The bequest includes a total of 272 objects, the majority of which are works on paper, spanning a time period from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. Gilbert collected broadly but focused on Old Master prints and drawings from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo periods.

Exhibition overview from museum website

  • Works on Paper
  • Various artists

Exhibition Venues & Dates