New York, Wildenstein & Company
January 25-May 1, 1999

Wildenstein & Company is pleased to announce an exhibition of French master drawings dating from the time of the Renaissance court at Fontainebleau to the Revolution of 1789. Over fourty sheets will be shown, including works by such major figures as Charles Le Brun, Jean Antoine Watteau, Jean Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jean Honoré Fragonard and Jean Baptiste Greuze. The major subject categories of the period - portraiture, landscape, religious, mythological and genre - will be represented. Also featured will be drawings related to the decorative arts, such as an important pair of sheets from the School of Fontainebleau, probably intended as studies for prints or tapestries, and two Rococo designs by Gilles Marie Oppenort. A large portion of the exhibited drawings are remarkable for their high degree of finish. Outstanding among them are a multifigured composition depicting the Virgin Mary trampling heresy (a study for a ceiling in the seminary chapel attached to Sainte-Sulpice, Paris) by Charles Le Brun, first painter to Louis XIV, love scenes in the taste of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, and a vivid portrait of the late eighteenth-century actress Madame Dugazon. In an advanced Neoclassical taste are drawings by Jacques Louis David and his rival Pierre Peyron. A feast for the eye, most of the sheets in the exhibition have rarely been on public view.