Existing comment:
Nineteenth-Century Art in Europe:
This small selection of works is part of VMFA's 19th- and early 20th-century art collection scheduled for reinstallation in late 2012. This gallery and the upcoming installation complement VMFA's works of the same period in Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon's collections, located in their own dedicated galleries. Here some of the works, such as William Bouguereau's Younger Brother, will be familiar to frequent VMFA visitors. However, the majority of the works are newly acquired, either through purchases or gifts, with the specific intention of amplifying and illustrating other trends in the art of that period.
Romantic art, already well represented by Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix in VMFA and its Mellon Collections, is enhanced by two new acquisitions: A Boar Hunt in Poalnd by Gericault's teacher Carle Vernet and Military Event by the Lyons-school painter Claude Bonnefond. Franz Xaver Winterhalter's Portrait of Lydia Schabelsky encapsulates the cult of the beautiful in Second-Empire France. Bouguereau's recently purchased early masterpiece Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths evidences a young academic artist's struggle to reconcile the traditional polarities of classic and romantic, ideal and real, color and design, and ancient and modern. Gustave Dore's A Family of Spanish Poachers is an essay in shocking colors, brushwork, and subject. In Woman in the Studio, Belgian Alfred Stevens developed a quieter manner of painting modern life, subject-matter explored in depth by the Impressionists, though here painted in a highly finished manner as influenced by Dutch 17th-century genre painting. The academic artist Charles Hoguet's landscape is most different from the Impressionist's approach, having been carefully painted in the studio rather than in the open air. Finally, a comparison of Pio Fedi's rough plaster sketch for his monumental sculpture, The Sacrifice of Polyxenia, with Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's sensuous bronzes is meant to dramatize the great contrasts inherent in 19th-century art. |