All Together in One Room: The Impressionist Exhibition of 1882

Event Details

95th Anniversary Signature Event

The Phillips Collection and the greater art community suffered an enormous loss with the passing of former Phillips Collection Director Charles Moffett in December 2015. The Phillips honors Charlie with a lecture by Richard Brettell.

This is a fitting tribute, as the late Charlie Moffett, with his colleague Ruth Berson and a score of museum and academic art historians, worked together reassembling the eight group exhibitions organized between 1874 and 1886 by the independent artists we now called Impressionists. A major exhibition of that subject curated by Moffett was held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and its catalogue and subsequent scholarly publication have had a lasting effect on scholarship about modern French painting.

Richard Brettell worked with Charlie Moffett on the 1877 exhibition, the first in which the artists called themselves “Impressionists.” In recent years, Brettell has become increasingly interested in the 1882 exhibition, which was, in his view, the finest of the eight. Using recent identifications and scholarship, he will reconstruct this landmark exhibition, the penultimate of the group, and argue for its importance to the larger history of art. 

Remembering Charlie Moffett

The Phillips Collection and the greater art community suffered an enormous loss with the passing of former Phillips Collection Director Charles Moffett in December 2015. He was a beloved leader, curator, and friend.

Charlie was Director of the Phillips from 1992–1998, bringing with him years of curatorial experience from his time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. 

In 1996, The Phillips Collection celebrated its 75th anniversary. In honor of that banner year, Charlie worked with the staff to initiate a major exhibition, Impressionists on the Seine: A Celebration of Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party.” The exhibition was by far the institution’s most ambitious to date, organized around Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s iconic painting. The exhibition proved to be the most successful show to date in the history of the museum, with nearly 200,000 visitors over the course of its five month run. Due to its enormous popularity, the show was extended for a two week period, and all attendance records for a single exhibition at the museum were shattered. 

A specialist in late-19th-century French painting, Charlie went on to organize the successful, nationally touring Impressionists in Winter: Effets de Neige, on view at the Phillips in 1998, and Impressionist Still Life, co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, held at the Phillips in 2001–2002. 

The Phillips remembers Charlie as a wonderful colleague, who connected deeply with the collection. His detail-oriented perfectionism and inclination toward lofty institutional goals contributed to the pioneering mindset that the Phillips and its staff so value today.