Claude Lorrain: “Landscape with St. George and the Dragon“, 1641
Old Masters to Monet – Mississippi Museum of Art The Mississippi Museum of Art presents ‘Old Masters to Monet: Three Centuries of French Painting’ from the Wadsworth Atheneum, on view from March 23 through September 8, 2013.]]>
Source: Mississippi Museum of Art
Old Masters to Monet features fifty masterpieces from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. The outstanding artworks provide a history of French painting, ranging from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries and into the beginning of the twentieth century and include religious and mythological subjects, portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes.
The exhibition begins with the great seventeenth-century masters, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Simon Vouet, and Jacques Stella, all of whom spent time in Rome and whose work embodies Italianate ideas of beauty, classical sculpture, and ideal landscape. Poussin’s enormous “Crucifixion”, painted in 1646 for President Jacques-Auguste de Thou, and Lorrain’s “Landscape with St. George and the Dragon”, commissioned by Cardinal Fausto Poli in 1641, are among the most important French paintings residing in the United States.
The eighteenth-century works present a remarkably rich tapestry of life in France during the rococo age. There are several scenes and portraits of aristocrats, including the Portrait of the Duchesse de Polignac by the era’s leading painter of women, Madame Vigée-Lebrun. A series of diverse trends unfolds during the nineteenth century. There is the vigorous Romanticism of Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix; pastoral and realistic landscapes by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Jules Dupré, Gustave Courbet, and Pierre-Etienne-Theodore Rousseau; the academicism of WilliamAdolphe Bourguereau, Jehan Georges Vibert, and Henri Paul Motte, whose “Trojan Horse” of 1874 is the most recent French painting purchased by the Atheneum.
Perhaps the most exciting group of works in the exhibition is the selection of the Impressionists, and no picture better captures the essence of this popular school than Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s famous painting of his friend Claude Monet at work in the garden of their rented home at Argenteuil in 1873. In addition, there are two superb paintings by Monet himself – the 1870 “Beach at Trouville” – and the 1904 depiction of his “Nymphéas (Water Lilies)”. Also included are fine examples by their colleagues Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne. The younger Post-Impressionistic generation, who pursued symbolist and expressionist means to achieve their ends, is represented here by Louis Anqutin’s seminal “Avenue de Clichy”, a view of a Parisian boulevard on a rainy evening.
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