The story
A small Holy Family by Sofonisba Anguissola, the Italian painter who spent years at the court of King Philip II of Spain, belongs to the Lowe Art Museum on the University of Miami campus in Coral Gables. She painted it in 1592, while living in Genoa, and it shows the Christ Child with his mother, Saint Anne and the young John the Baptist as a close family scene.
The museum started modestly. In 1950 the university opened an art gallery in a classroom building, and in 1952 the philanthropists Joe and Emily Lowe paid for a building of its own, the first art museum in South Florida. In 1961 a wing was added to receive more than 40 Renaissance and Baroque paintings from the collection of Samuel H. Kress, the dime-store founder whose foundation placed old masters in museums across the United States. Today the Lowe counts close to 19,500 objects, with strengths in Native American and ancient art and a pavilion devoted to contemporary glass.
The French holdings bring in the late 19th century. Claude Monet's Waterloo Bridge of 1903 belongs to the series he began from his room at the Savoy Hotel in London. Paul Gauguin's The Barge and the Boat dates from 1882, the year before he left the Paris financial world to paint full time.
