The Dahesh Collection Celebrates a Decade of Discovery

This will mark the museum's tenth anniversary by utilizing a dense display of wide-ranging mediums set against colored walls. The curatorial team will show how the museum grew out of the prescient collecting of Dr Dahesh, how it has helped fuel interest in Nineteenth Century European art of the academic tradition and how its growing holdings illustrated the grand themes that defined the period.

Filling the museum's entire 6,000-square-feet suite of galleries, this will be the largest presentation ever of its permanent collection, serving both as recap and a visual manifesto for future investigations of art made between 1789 and 1914.

The exhibition will open with a room introducing Dr Dahesh, the pen name of Salim Moussa Achi (1909-1984), an influential Lebanese writer, philosopher and connoisseur in whose honor the museum is named, as a collector who perceived - long before most others - the merits of the academic paintings and sculptures that once dominated Nineteenth Century culture, but were cast aside after World War I.

Selected from Dahesh's own collection, the artworks in this gallery will anticipate the overarching themes examined closely in subsequent galleries. These are religion, classical history and myth, landscape and rustic life, political history, literature and narrative and Orientalism.

The importance of drawing as the touchstone of all academic art making will be underscored in a focus gallery filled with works on paper that reflect both tireless labor and free-wheeling inspiration. The museum will highlight numerous drawings donated recently by private individuals.

A separate gallery will explore how central academies were in Nineteenth Century culture - teaching talented youngsters to draw, paint, sculpt and design; exhibiting and marketing their creations to enormous crowds and trumpeting the fame of the greatest talents through elevation to Art's officialdom. Special attention will be paid to Paris's Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Salon.

This exhibition's signature image will be the museum's "Water Girl," a large oil painting on canvas painted in 1885 by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905).

The museum is at 580 Madison Avenue. For information, www.daheshmuseum.org or 212-759-0606.