Art That Keeps Giving

The sweeping philanthropic imprint of the late Lord Paul and Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree has left an indelible mark on Santa Barbara. Its lingering impact is felt in the Ridley-Tree Cancer Center, generous contributions to UCSB, the Santa Barbara Symphony, and elsewhere, but it has a special cachet in Santa Barbara’s art world, including the branding imprimatur of the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art.

And just as the Westmont Museum has twice paid direct tribute to the Ridley-Trees and their auspicious gifts to the permanent collection (including many Corot paintings), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is also extending its curatorial appreciation with the current exhibition A Legacy of Giving showcasing in-house collections courtesy of the Ridley-Trees.

The generous donors (Paul died in 2005 and Leslie in 2022, at age 98) had a deep connection to SBMA over a quarter-century, including supporting the Education Center, helping with the ambitious Peck Wing renovation, and growing the permanent collection with 58 works, either donated directly or acquired. A healthy selection of 33 pieces in the McCormick Gallery, mostly linked to the collectors’ passion for 19th-century paintings and other art, gives a strong sense of the Ridley-Tree aesthetic.

On one wall, a quote by one of the collectors’ favored artists, Gustave Courbet, poses an interesting historical-philosophical point. “When I am no longer controversial,” he wrote, “I will no longer be important.” Courbet and many of the pre-Modernist artists on view in this gallery are far beyond the buzz of controversy, but their importance — on their own terms and as influences on art to come — is decidedly important. 

We ease gently into the show, thanks to the dreamy scene of Paul Signac’s “The Riverbank, the Seine at Herblay” from 1889, on the entrance-facing wall. A peaceable riverfront stroll is timelessly captured in the tufted and dabbled pointillist artist’s signature style.

Courbet and Narcisse Díaz de la Peña present alternate views of seascapes at sunset, the former tranquil and the latter stormy, while Cecil Gordon Lawson’s “A Hymn to Spring” qualifies as the exhibition’s largest and most unapologetically vivid painting, a meadow scene with trees tickling the foreground. 

The zone of paintings culled under the curatorial heading of “Factories and Farms” addresses the incursion — or peripheral hum — of urbanization and industrialization on the generally natural and agrarian turf many 19th-century painters focused on. In Gustave Caillebotte’s “The Stable of Champfleury,” circa the 1880s, a low-ceilinged stable exudes a hermetically warm, palpable equestrian ambience.

One of the showstoppers nudges toward the innovative late-19th-century pull of impressionism, by a master of the form. Claude Monet’s spectrally rippling ode to a legendary river, “Matinee sur la Seine (Afternoon on the Seine),” projects a seductive allure, at once basking in proto-Impressionist atmospherics while also vibrant with dancing polyrhythmic brushstrokes.

Paying attention to women artists from an era of male-dominant art world leanings, the Ridley-Trees also sought to acquire and promote female painters of the day, here represented by the rare female impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt.

In a bit of trans-institutional déjà vu, the SBMA exhibition also features a handful of paintings from the Barbizon school, including the rustic charm and artful picturesqueness of Charles-Émile Jacque’s “Herd of Sheep in the Forest at Fontainebleau.” This French art movement of the mid-19th century, including the looming presence of Corot, has a bold stake in the Ridley-Tree gifts to the Westmont Museum collection, as seen in that museum’s tribute shows to the grand donors. 

Suffice to say, the Ridley-Tree legacy includes art in and out of lofty vaults in town, art that keeps occasionally giving Santa Barbara’s art scene welcome shots in the arm

A Legacy of Giving: The Lady Leslie and Lord Paul Ridley-Tree Collection is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art through November 3. See sbma.net for more information.