In this first installation of works on long-term loan from the collection of the Woodsby family, we start appropriately at the beginning, with the rise of the Highwaymen and a focus on the two founding figures of this much-loved yet under-sung art movement, Alfred Hair and Harold Newton.

For the late nineteenth century, on the cusp of the abstractive trends of the twentieth, the celebrated master sculptor was Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Rodin’s bronze sculptures not only revived for a new century the expressive and naturalistic styles of antiquity, using ancient Greek sculptors’ medium of choice, but also propelled figurative sculpture into the modern age with emotion and pathos never seen before in the sculpted form.

— Mark Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 1947