In late 2007, the Dixon and the Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, Pensylvania, began to explore the possibility of a temporary collections exchange. After many conversations, it was decided that a group of the Dixon's finest Impressionist paintings would travel north and thirty of the Allentown Art Museum's prized Renaissance and Baroque treasures would come to Memphis in early 2009.

Venice to Brussels, the exhibition created by Allentown for the Dixon, features works by some of the most important artists of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, including Lorenzo Lotto, Romainino, Domenico Tintoretto, and the great master of Venetian view paintings, Canaletto. Allentown will also be sending great Flemish paintings, early German portraits, and seventeeth-century Dutch masterworks by Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Adriaen van Ostade, Jan Steen, and a luminous portrait of a young woman from the studio of Rembrandt.

From Venice to Brussels features a broad selection of Renaissance and Baroque themes, including biblical imagery, lively genre scenes, lanscapes, still lifes, and spectacular portraits.