Britain's Golden Age

British art comes into its own in the eighteenth century. For the first time artists born in Britain—Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Richard Wilson, to name a few—set the European standard in portraiture and landscape, for which the country’s art has come to be best known and most admired. Many of their most talented followers are on view in this new installation of paintings from the Berger Collection.

ABOUT THE COLLECTION

William M. B. Berger and his wife Bernadette Johnson Berger, founders of the collection that bears their name, began acquiring works of art by British artists in the mid-1990s. In a few short years they had assembled a collection of several hundred objects that spanned six centuries, from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century. They were passionate about art’s potential to educate, and saw the collection as a resource for adults and children alike. Since 1998, most of The Berger Collection has been on longterm loan to the DAM, where a selection of works is on rotating view in a gallery dedicated to the collection on level 6 of the North Building.