To celebrate the centennial of its establishment in New York City, Wildenstein & Co. announces a major exhibition of Old Master French art. This undertaking, ambitious both in its scope and its depth, offers a stunning visual survey of French art from c. 1500 to 1815. Included here are works by such masters as Jean Clouet, Nicolas Poussin, Jean Siméon Chardin, François Boucher, Jean Honoré Fragonard, Jean Antoine Houdon, Jean Baptiste Greuze, Jacques Louis David, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Pierre Paul Prud’hon and Jean-Baptiste-Dominique Ingres.
The exhibition will benefit American Friends of the Louvre, a newly created, non-profit organization dedicated to reinforcing the cultural and social ties that have bound the citizens of France and the United States since 1778, when Louis XVI recognized the fledgling American republic and became its military ally. Americans make up a significant percentage of the foreigners who annually visit the Louvre. One of American Friends’ main objectives is to allow the Louvre to work with its American counterparts through a program of exchange exhibitions that will benefit museum-goers on both sides of the Atlantic.
General admission to the exhibition will be $10, or $5 for seniors and students with ID.
* * * * * * *
Nathan Wildenstein—the founder of the Wildenstein gallery—and three generations of his descendants, Georges, Daniel, Guy and Alec, have all been dedicated Francophiles. Their love of their French heritage and devotion to the propagation of France’s language, the scholarly investigation of its artistic past and the dissemination of the fruits of its culture, have been consistent and profound. The Arts of France exhibition is intended to chronicle French history from the Renaissance to the age of Revolution, the instatement of the First Republic and its replacement by the Napoleonic Empire. One sees pass in sequence the France of five Valois rulers: François Ier, François’ son Henri II and three of his grandsons: François II, Charles IX and Henri III. After the Valois dynasty came to a dramatic close when the latter was assassinated as a consequence of the wars of religion, the crown passed to his distant cousin and brother-in-law Henri IV, the first of the Bourbon kings. Born a Protestant and a convert to Catholicism, he also died by an assassin’s hand for religiously inspired motives. The reigns of his successors—Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI—marked not only the apogee of France’s intellectual and artistic dominion throughout Europe, but also the decline and eventual extinction of the concept of “divine right” monarchy. With the outbreak of the Revolution, the centuries-old institution finally collapsed and was replaced by the Commune de Paris and the Thermidorian Reaction, the territorial expansionism of the Directoire, the Consulat and the totalitarian reign of Napoléon Bonaparte, who crowned himself Emperor and ruled single-mindedly until dethroned and sent permanently into exile in 1815.
* * * * * * *
In its entirety, The Arts of France exhibition provides an overview of French society during a span of three centuries, and some exhibited works illustrate key events in French history. Others depict activities at the Court of France in the Palaces of Versailles, Fontainebleau, Chantilly or the Tuileries, as well as life in Paris and in the provinces. The major artistic media and techniques—applied with varying degrees of finish by painters, sculptors, draftsmen, printmakers and tapestry makers—are represented.
According to the hierarchy of genres prevalent during the period in question, precedence was accorded to historical subjects based on Judeo-Christian writings, Greco-Roman mythology, allegory, ancient and modern events and works of literature, and all are featured in the show. Included are two extraordinarily sensuous allegories—one, Aurora, by one of the supreme masters of the Rococo, Fragonard, and a neoclassical interpretation of a similar theme by Prud’hon, Cupid Seducing Innocence, a work originally commissioned by Empress Joséphine. Also featured are scenes of everyday life, contemporary reportage, landscape and still life, such as Jean Baptiste Oudry’s monumental After the Hunt. A genre that figures prominently here is portraiture, and in this area visitors to the gallery will find a cross-section of most components of French society, from the high and mighty to the proletariat: royalty, the landed gentry, state functionaries, jurists, clergymen, military leaders, financiers, artists, writers and other types of intellectuals, musicians, actors, art dealers and members of the Third Estate. Among the major examples on display will be Nicolas de Largillierre’s newly discovered self portrait of 1707, Alexandre Roslin’s Comtesse d’Egmont Pignatelli in Spanish Costume (a sumptuous performance) and Joseph Chinard’s sober bust of First Consul Bonaparte.
In terms of size, there are paintings almost as large as murals (such as Hubert Robert’s Mill near the Fortified Castle and its companion Herders Crossing a Footbridge at Tivoli) and as small as miniatures, monumental marble and stone sculptures and finely wrought terracottas, all of them adhering to the highest standards of artistry and craftsmanship. One of the revelations of the show is a terracotta portrait of the young Nicolas Poussin by his friend François Du Quesnoy.
Published in conjunction with The Arts of France exhibition is a large, scholarly and fully illustrated book of the same title. Containing one hundred sixty-seven entries, this book includes a Foreword by Henri Loyrette, the President and Director of the Louvre, a Preface by Guy Wildenstein and an in-depth chronicle of Wildenstein and Old Master French art from the time of the gallery’s inception in France in 1875 until the present day. It also features an illustrated selection of more than one hundred of the finest French paintings, sculptures and drawings that have been sold by the gallery and today hold pride of place in public collections throughout the Americas, Europe and Japan. This reference work, the largest and most comprehensive panorama of Old Master French art ever produced by a private gallery, may be purchased ($85 plus shipping and handling) at Wildenstein, by telephone, e-mail or on-line.
The entries explore the role of patronage, both official and private, and highlight the importance of the Salons that brought artists into the public arena, gave them social standing and critical recognition and spurred them to outperform each other. This holds true for both male and female artists, once the latter were able to compete on more or less even ground. The catalogue also recounts how artists were apprenticed in the corporate guild and academic systems, whose sanction usually constituted the route to success. Such patronage afforded students not only technical instruction, but also travel grants and official commissions, and it eventually opened the way for participation in the Salons of the Academies.
Italy—where many monuments of Antiquity were to be found, where the arts had flourished for centuries under the sponsorship of the Catholic church and the leaders of the city states, and where the natural scenery was celebrated for its picturesque diversity—was the wellspring from which French artists derived considerable inspiration. (The Italian Mannerist aesthetic informs the four magnificent term figures from the Château d’Oiron, works that have not been seen in public since they were lent by J. Pierpont Morgan, Jr. in 1925 to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.) French artists, in fact, flocked to Italy as laureates of the Academies or by whatever means they could muster. Some remained there for many years (such as Pierre Mignard, Charles Joseph Natoire and Hubert Robert), while others found that they could not function without its direct inspiration. Nicolas Poussin, most notably, chose to remain there. His Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well amounts to a pictorial affirmation of the artist’s adoption of Rome as his second patrie.
At various times, especially during the reigns of François Ier, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI and Napoléon Ier, when France held an almost hegemonic position in both politics and the arts, it attracted some of the most creative minds in Europe, and by the eighteenth century its language had become universal. A number of foreign-born artists spent a considerable part of their careers within its borders, among them Jean Clouet, Corneille de Lyon and Alexandre Roslin, all of whom achieved international reputations and figure significantly in the exhibition. Moreover, many itinerant French artists exported their aesthetic and stylistic innovations to the countries they visited.
* * * * * * *
Our wish is that those who see the exhibition or peruse the pages of the accompanying publication will be able to appreciate the richness and complexity of France’s civilization during three hundred years of its history, centuries that were marked by alternating periods of peace and prosperity, warfare and social unrest, and through which ran a consistent and ever-changing flow of vital, creative energy.
We also hope that the exhibition will lead to an increase in individual and corporate involvement with American Friends of the Louvre. France’s greatest national museum, a vast repository of the arts of many countries and many periods, remains a potent source of intellectual stimulation and aesthetic pleasure for all who enter its doors.