The Epic and the Intimate: French Drawings from the John D. Reilly Collection

Aug 28, 2011 - Oct 9, 2011 | Snite Museum of Art

Snite Museum of Art
August 28–October 9, 2011

Organized from the rich holdings of the Snite Museum's permanent collection, this exhibition presented about sixty works illustrating 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 offered visitors an opportunity to explore 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."

Artists in the exhibition included Simon Vouet, Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Baptiste Greuze. 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.

Exhibition Schedule:

• Flint Institute of Arts, May 5–July 29, 2012
• Georgia Museum of Art, August 18–November 3, 2012
• Crocker Art Museum, June 22–September 29, 2013

View a pdf of the labels for The Epic and the Intimate (4.1MB PDF)

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