Tradition & transitions

de Clark, Alvin L. Jr, Pierre Rosenberg

This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue provide the visitor and reader with an exploration of the "tradition and transitions" of manners and themes that formed and shifted throughout the art of eighteenth-century France. Examples of works that reveal both the concurrent and successive styles of the long eighteenth-century of French draftsmanship from Charles de La Fosse and Jean-Baptiste Jouvenet at the end of the seventeenth century to the genesis of the Rococo (Claude Gillot, Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Le Moyne) and the Generation of 1700 (Edme Bouchardon, François Boucher, Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, Jacques Dumont, CharlesJoseph Natoire, Pierre-Hubert Subleyras, the Vanloos, which took the French School to its early maturity. Their students, particularly Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Hubert Robert, benefited from and greatly expanded upon this rich inheritance as some of their contemporaries (Charles-Nicolas Cochin le jeune, Joseph-Marie Vien, Jean-Baptiste Deshays, Gabriel-François Doyen) simultaneously searched for a new, less florid mode of expression that eventually led to the Neoclassicism of JacquesLouis David and his generation in the closing decades of the century. Their students then explored stylistic and thematic variations of that manner into the next century. The wealth of this collection enables visitors to see a full array of the art made within these successive generations by well-known masters as well as by lesser-known artists who were often considered to be their equals in their own time. It also reveals the large variety of regional styles from artists working in important centers other than Paris.