October
8, 2004
MHC
Art Museum Showcases French Landscape
Charles-Francois
Daubigny, The Water’s Edge, Optevoz, circa 1856 |
French painters over the centuries have taken
to landscape with a zeal arguably unmatched by artists of other
nationalities. Their engagement with nature is illustrated in
an exhibition at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum this fall
titled Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins
of French Landscape Painting, on view from September 7 through December 12. The exhibition
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, cocurators
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 catalog, written by the
cocurators, show 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 is considered
the “father” of French Neoclassical landscape painting, and a significant
segment of this show focuses on his Classical Greek Landscape
with Girls Sacrificing Their Hair to Diana. Painted in 1790, this lyrical work is now part of the museum’s
permanent collection.
Eventually French landscape painters began to
question the authority of the classical tradition. Charles-François Daubigny’s The
Water’s Edge, Optevoz, created circa 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.
Aside from the two featured paintings by Valenciennes
and Daubigny, the exhibition 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-nineteenth-century France. Explanatory wall text and illustrative material,
such as photographs, treatises on landscape, vintage postcards, and maps, are
included.
The
counter is
2,496
|
