The Lyman Allyn Art Museum’s collection is quite expansive, with upwards of 17,000 pieces stored on the third floor of the New London museum. The Collections Storage Vault boasts racks of paintings and flat files of prints and photos, with shelving offering a resting place for three-dimensional objects.

Those thousands of pieces include smaller components — each piece of a set of china, for instance, would be counted individually.

While there is no way to put everything from the collection on view at the same time, the museum occasionally creates an exhibition with a theme that can highlight some of those artworks.

And so a rich, eclectic group of paintings have been culled for “Brought to Light: European Paintings from the Collection,” on display through spring of 2020.

As the exhibition text notes, “European paintings have been part of the collection since the Lyman Allyn opened in 1932, but the museum’s more recent emphasis on American art has placed its European paintings infrequently on view. ‘Brought to Light’ reexamines the museum’s European paintings, sharing key pieces and their rich stories with the public.”

Tanya Pohrt, curator at the Lyman Allyn, says, “One of the important roles that the museum has as a repository or a storehouse of art in the collection is to really utilize that collection and take care of it. Part of our mission, of course, is to celebrate and care for art in the collection that has been given to us, in many cases, by members of the community over the decades. Much of the strength of our European collection comes from those early decades of the museum’s founding and mid-century.”

The resulting exhibition offers an overview of some of the most important themes in European art and history from the early Renaissance through the 1800s, providing insight into art and culture of a particular moment in time.

Pohrt says there are a lot of great treasures in the collection, and it was difficult to decide which ones to put together for this show. The paintings she ended up selecting are grouped by subject matter — still life and genre painting; history painting and landscape; and portraiture.

Discussing the latter, she says, “Portraits, I think, are so fascinating, and there are some examples we have where we don’t know the identities of the sitters. But you can still read a lot of information from the dress, the kind of background in a portrait, and you can get a sense, of course, of the nationality and the moment in which a portrait is painted,” Pohrt says.

Sometimes, people commissioned portraits for posterity, as a way for their children and grandchildren to remember them. Those paintings showed not only how the person looked but also what his or her station and values in life were, since those were often encoded in portraits, Pohrt says.

Less is known about certain portraits in “Brought to Light,” and Pohrt is planning to correspond with scholars to see if she can uncover more stories and information related to the works.

There is, for instance, a portrait of a Dutch mother and child from the 17th century. Pohrt notes that the piece “is just very beautiful, a lot of sumptuous fabric. There is jewelry they wear. But there’s something very touching about the pair of them together. I think there is the possibility that some of these portraits were done to commemorate the death of a child or just with the knowledge that life can be very fleeting.”

A critique of excess

Still lifes, meanwhile, emerged as a category of art in the Netherlands in the 1600s, spurred in part by that country’s trade and commerce. The Dutch experienced a rapid increase in their wealth and dominance of trade in world markets, which meant they had more disposable income to spend on art.

“With this growth of a newer upper-middle-class mercantile population, there is this interest in works of art that deal with all the things that come with wealth and trade. So there are floral still lifes, for example, where they have flowers taken from different parts of the world that reflect the ability to transport things back and forth quickly and the type of money required to acquire those things. They become status symbols,” Pohrt says.

Some paintings, on the other hand, caution against excess. One of the pieces is a Flemish work created somewhere around 1525-1569 by an unknown artist inspired by “The Fat Kitchen” by Peter Bruegel the Elder. Here, overweight, wealthy people are gorging — but don’t offer sustenance to a skinny, bedraggled fellow who is being led out of the room. Works like this are supposed to be humorous while having moral critiques woven into them.

Land or man?

One of the more eye-catching paintings on display is “Landscape and Portrait,” circa 1600s, by an unknown artist, which is a visual puzzle or optical illusion. It’s a hilly landscape — but, if the viewer looks at it in a different way, it resembles a man with a beard.

“It’s unique. It’s the only painting in our collection that’s like that,” Pohrt says. “It’s a somewhat quirky, unusual format. There aren’t a tremendous number of these that were produced. It’s a work we don’t know very much about in terms of exactly where it was painted or for whom.”

Artists of renown

While some of the paintings in “Brought to Light” are by artists whose identities aren’t known, others are by historically significant figures.

“Garden Scene” from the early 1700s, for instance, is by Jacques de Lajoue, who helped create the style known as French Rococo (which emphasized ornamentation, light colors and curving forms). His royal commissions included several from Madame de Pompadour, who was Louis XV’s chief mistress for several years.

“Still Life with Flowers,” from the late 1600s, is by Jean Baptiste Belin de Fontenay the Elder, who painted floral murals at King Louis XIV’s royal residences at Versailles and Fontainebleu.

Inside Rome’s Pantheon

One of the other categories explored in “Brought to Light” is history painting, which, the exhibition text states, is “a term derived from the Latin term historia, meaning story or narrative. (It) includes religious subjects from the Bible and scenes derived from Classical history and mythology.”

The religious paintings on display focus on saints and Biblical scenes and include fragments of altarpieces and studies for ceiling murals.

Also included in the history paintings/landscape section of “Brought to Light” is an 18th-century painting of the interior view of the Pantheon in Rome.

It’s based on a piece by Giovanni Paolo Panini, who produced a number of versions of this particular area of the Pantheon, from a couple of different perspectives.

He and his followers created copies of the paintings that many people who were visiting Rome purchased.

“There are several paintings in a row (in the exhibition) that look at the fascination with antiquity that appears in the Renaissance and then reappears at several other points in the 17th and 18th centuries, as many people from America and from England began to travel on the grand tour, where they were spending time seeing all of the great sites of antiquity in Europe,” Pohrt says.

Some of the paintings in the Lyman Allyn’s collection are almost like large-scale souvenir postcards that people could take home from their travels, she says.

Trying to learn more

As the exhibition text notes, “Brought to Light” reflects “consultations with subject specialists and recent research, with the goal of better understanding the collection and advancing scholarship.”

And Pohrt is in touch with scholars who are compiling online or book catalogues of all of a given artist’s known work.

“Connecting with these people is a sort of peer review process, helping ensure that our objects are known within the scholarly literature,” she says.

If you go

What: "Brought to Light: European Paintings from the Collection"

Where: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 625 Williams St., New London

When: Through summer 2020; hours 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. and 1-5 p.m. Sun.

Admission: $12 adults, $9 seniors, $5 students, $7 active military personnel, and free for kids under 12, for museum members and for New London residents

Contact: (860) 443-2545, www.lymanallyn.org