Acquisitions

Valenciennes and Plein-Air Painting

Searching for new acquisitions is one of the most exciting aspects of a museum curator's work-the icing on the cake, so to speak. Here at the Art Museum, decisions about purchases are based on several factors: what is essential for the museum's teaching mission; how an object will serve the needs of as many disciplines as possible; how it will relate to other works in the collection; and, of course, how it stacks up in terms of quality and physical condition.

The landscape collection is one of the museum's strongest features, as was evident in the 1998 exhibition On the Nature of Landscape. That innovative show explored the farthest reaches of the notion of landscape-from paintings and porcelain to abstract sculpture, photography, prints, and textiles. It also included an astonishing range of perspectives in wall-texts written by faculty, students, and members of the community. In mounting this exhibition, however, we were reminded of a crucial gap in the collection that we had attempted to fill for years-a Neoclassical landscape based on studies made out-of-doors, on the spot. Last year, at the end of an intensive quest, we finally located and acquired an extraordinary example of the genre. Not only was the painting perfect in quality, condition, and content, but it was by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, the distinguished founder of the Neoclassical landscape tradition itself.

Valenciennes, born in Toulouse in 1750, was at the center of an ideological transformation in landscape painting in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Trained in the French academy, he traveled to Italy, sketching his way up and down the peninsula. Eventually he went on to become a teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At that very moment, the traditional view of hierarchy in painting was undergoing a fundamental change. The paysage historique-or landscape with historical subject matter-gained parity with history painting, formerly the most revered mode of artistic expression, and views of the natural world became a forum for radical artistic experiments. Valenciennes was dedicated to the disciplined study of perspective and the effects of light and shade, along with the innovative practice of painting studies for his more developed works out-of-doors (en plein air). His students and those of the next generation discovered that by embracing the study of nature as an essential and empirical element in their art, what had been intended as a stage in the creative process could become an end in itself.

Valenciennes was at the height of his powers when he painted the idyllic Mount Holyoke landscape, one of seven shown at the 1791 Salon. It was hung together with Landscape, View of Italy with Bathers now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The Salon catalogue documented the existence of a pendant to the Boston painting, but its whereabouts was unknown. Having emerged from obscurity now, it will play an important role in our active teaching museum, illustrating for students and other viewers the evolution of landscape painting in the Neoclassical age. One historian recently summed up the Mount Holyoke painting, saying: "Valenciennes' structured, clear composition and beautiful single light source make it a perfect expression of how the Enlightenment world worked."

The painting will be on view at the reopening of the newly expanded museum in the spring, in the company of many other stellar examples of landscape.

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