Reform to Restoration
French Art from Louis XVI to Louis XVIII from the Horvitz Collection
French Art from Louis XVI to Louis XVIII from the Horvitz Collection
The 125 drawings and 20 paintings in this exhibition reveal the ways that more than 70 artists engaged with artistic debates, archaeological discoveries, and sweeping political changes from the final decades of the ancien régime through the French Revolution, Empire, and Restoration. The show explores the visual shifts in taste, which moved away from the popular and decorative mid-18th-century Rococo style toward a more structured and formal Classicism and, in the early 19th century, Romanticism.
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The exhibition includes all the major artists of the period, from Classicists Joseph-Marie Vien, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, François-André Vincent, and Jacques-Louis-David, to early Romantic works by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Baron Gérard, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Théodore Gericault. It also offers a wide array of drawing types and painting styles, from figural and compositional studies to highly finished works for book illustration to major, large-scale public commissions. Themes include mythology, religion, ancient and modern history, and public events, as well as modes of imagery specific to the initial French Republic, the First Empire, and the return of the Bourbon monarchs.