One of the leading encyclopedic museums in the country, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (NAMA) is recognized for its European collections. In 2015, Kansas City collectors Henry and Marion Bloch expanded NAMA’s already significant holdings by donating their collection of twenty-nine Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces. This gift transformed the museum by broadening the scope of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century art available to our visitors, bringing NAMA’s French collection to a total of 110 French paintings and pastels dating between 1600 and 1945.
Collection highlights include masterworks by Nicolas Poussin, François Boucher, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Jean-François Millet, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh, among others. While the majority of the museum’s French works are on view to local visitors, this online collection catalogue brings the entire corpus of French paintings and pastels to visitors and scholars worldwide. In this definitive scholarly resource, published in installments starting in 2021, noted specialists and museum staff present in-depth research and discussion about each painting and pastel.