The Meadows Museum, SMU, announced that it has acquired four works that reflect the richness and depth of Spanish art across period, style, and mode of production. Among the new acquisitions is Our Lady of Solitude (1769) by Manuel Ramírez de Arellano, which represents both a critical expansion of scholarly knowledge on the artist’s creative output and an important enhancement of the Meadow’s holdings of terracotta sculpture, building on other acquisitions in that medium over the last several years. Further, following the Meadows’s 2018 exhibition Dalí: Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936, which focused on Salvador Dalí’s small-scale paintings, the museum has been given Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936, cast 1971), the first sculptural work by Dalí to enter the museum’s collections. Also among the new acquisitions are a drawing by renowned artist Ignacio Zuloaga, Portrait of Margaret Kahn (1923), which provides new insights into the artist’s process and highlights his success as a portraitist among American audiences, as well as the painting Orchard in Seville (c. 1880), by Emilio Sánchez Perrier, a rare example of the artist’s work at a large scale, produced early in his career.

Together, the new acquisitions underscore the Meadows’s commitment to collecting works that encapsulate significant developments in the trajectory of Spanish art and to establishing essential touchstones within its collection that spur new research, exhibitions, and publications. Of the new acquisitions, Mark A. Roglán, the Linda P. and William A. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum, said, “As we continue to acquire works, we are focused on furthering the established dialogues between and among objects in our collection, while also creating new connections that enhance both scholarly understanding of Spanish art and public enjoyment of it. We are particularly excited to bring these four works into the museum’s holdings because they represent important developments within each artist’s career as well as essential enhancements to our collection. We look forward to displaying these works in the coming months, and to furthering knowledge about each of these artist’s practices.”