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The show consists of over thirty-five master drawings, oil sketches and watercolors by such major figures as Degas, Delacroix, Géricault, Ingres and Millet. The Neo-classical movement is exemplified by two late drawings by Jacques Louis David and three works by his pupil Ingres, including a delicate pencil and wash study for his Romulus Victorious Over Acron, a large painting commisioned by Napoleon in 1811. By another pupil of David, Girodet, is a dramatic gouache drawing depicting a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid. French advocates of Romanticism, Neo-classicism’s stylistic and ideological antithesis, are also represented, most notably the movement’s champions, Géricault and Delacroix. By the latter artist is an electrifying composition drawn from Byron’s “The Giaour” illustrating a furious struggle between the Venetian subject of the poem and his Turkish nemesis. Another aspect of the literary imagination that informed Romanticism is a haunting view of a castellated town by Victor Hugo and a chilling depiction of a hanged man by the same author. Also included are examples of pure landscape by such painters as Jean-François Millet, Théodore Rousseau and Camille Corot. These artists formed the so-called School of Barbizon, named for a town in the Forest of Fontainebleau that was one of their favorite locales. Particularly lush is a painting from Corot’s first visit to Italy, Civita Castellana: fabriques au sommet des rochers.
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