The Epic and the Intimate: French Drawings From the John D. Reilly Collection at the Snite Museum of Art
Saturday, Aug 18, 2012 — Saturday, Nov 03, 2012
Organized by the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame, this exhibition, including works by Simon Vouet, Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jacques-Louis David, illustrated the history of French drawing from before the foundation of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648 through the French Revolution of 1789 and its subsequent reforms of the 1800s. The drawings offer an opportunity to see the range of media employed, including chalk, colored chalks, ink and crayon; a variety of favored subjects, such as narrative compositions, portraits, landscapes and genre scenes; and types of drawings from figure and drapery studies, quick sketches of initial ideas to complex, multi-figured, highly developed, compositional “machines.” Later artists such as Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Anne-Louis Girodet, Honoré Daumier, Théodore Rousseau and Edgar Degas signal the transition into the modern era that glorified the individual and the local. The exhibition was also on view at the Snite, the Flint Institute of Arts and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California.
Curator
Lynn Boland, Pierre Daura Curator of European Art (in-house)
Sponsors
The W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art