Past Exhibitions

Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins of
French Landscape Painting

7 September–12 December 2004

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes Classical Greek Landscape

French painters have long had a special affinity with landscape. Their engagement with nature is illustrated in this exhibition that traces the depiction of landscape from the late Renaissance-when it first emerged from the background of narrative representation-to the eve of Impressionism in the nineteenth century.

Using carefully selected paintings, oil sketches, drawings, and prints, co-curators Michael Marlais, James M. Gillespie Professor of Art at Colby College, John Varriano, Idella Plimpton Kendall Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College, and Wendy Watson, the museum's curator, show the many choices French artists faced as they made their way through the rural landscape over the course of three centuries. This exhibition and its lavishly illustrated catalogue, written by the co-curators, make an important contribution to the scholarship of French landscape painting with a revealing new look at salient moments in its history. In short, the installation shows the difference between classicism and naturalism as stylistic developments in French art while demonstrating both the changes from one period to the other and the continuity between them.

For a large portion of the three centuries represented, the classical idiom captured and sustained artists' imaginations. Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, the "father" of French Neoclassical landscape painting, constitutes a milestone in the itinerary. A significant segment of this show focuses on an analysis of his Classical Greek Landscape with Girls Sacrificing their Hair to Diana. Painted in 1790, this lyrical canvas was purchased for the museum's permanent collection in 2000.

Charles-François Daubigny The Water's Edge, Optevoz

Eventually French landscape painters began to question the authority of that inherited tradition. Charles François Daubigny's Water's Edge, Optevoz, created in 1856, introduces both a new empiricism and a freshly conceived regional chauvinism to the formulas the artist had learned as a student and perfected during his own Italian sojourn. Daubigny's painting, a gift to the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in 1981, provides a second focus to the exhibition and elucidates another milestone along the path of one of France's most adventurous artistic journeys.

Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld Ponte San Rocco, Tivoli

The exhibition also includes a variety of works of art from the schools of Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, as well as Jean-Victor Bertin, Jean-Joseph Bidauld, Jean-Charles Rémond, Jean-Antoine Constantin, Hubert Robert, Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau, Narcisse-Virgilio Diaz, Henri Harpignies, and others. A selection of prints by Daubigny and Adolphe Appian demonstrates the notable contribution printmaking made to landscape representation in mid-19th-century France. Explanatory wall text and illustrative material, such as photographs, treatises on landscape, vintage postcards and maps, are included.

Charles-François Daubigny Landscape

These important and beautiful works of art have come together at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum from many lenders, among them the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smith College Museum of Art; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College; Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College; Colby College Museum of Art; Middlebury College Museum of Art; Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University; as well as a number of private collectors.

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