French Painting at the National Gallery of Art


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French Brochure Introduction



François Boucher (1703-1770)

The Love Letter, 1750
Oil on canvas over wood, .820 x .752 m
Timken Collection 1960.6.3
18th-century galleries

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806)

The Swing, probably about 1765, oil on canvas, 2.159 x 1.855 m., Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.17


Elegant young people amuse themselves at a fête galante (an idyllic gathering) with flirtation and games of love. They find themselves in a magical garden, an immense expanse of earth and sky that is an idealized vision of Nature, imposing yet tamed by civilization. Light plays on the towering clouds and breaks through in patches on the ground to illuminate the tiny figures as if they were on a spotlit stage. Our eye falls on a young woman swinging beneath the trees. As she waves with a flower to her companions, she kicks out a leg to reveal petticoats, ankles, and a dainty calf. To eighteenth-century audiences, the swing's rhythm and motion would have suggested erotic abandon. Looking carefully, we find that this swing is pulled by a youth barely visible in the shadows between the two lion fountains-and so we discover a romantic attachment.

Fragonard adopted the lighthearted subjects of his teacher Boucher, but painted in a freer style. Quick trills of paint create silk ruffles; spare dots of color are sufficient to convey a wealth of flowers. "Swordplay of the brush" one contemporary called it. This painting and its companion nearby, Blindman's Buff, originally formed part of a large scheme of decoration.


Camille Pissarro

Place du Carrousel, Paris, 1900, Oil on canvas, .549 x .654 m., Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.55


From the dappled edge of the Tuileries Gardens, we see the Louvre across the light-filled Place du Carrousel, the site of renovations undertaken for the museum's bicentennial in 1993. The pavilion at left, until recently part of the finance ministry, has now been reclaimed for gallery space. Better known for rural landscapes, Pissarro came to paint urban scenes late in his career. As his vision failed and he was forced to work indoors, he rented rooms that gave him views of Rouen, Paris, and other cities. Influenced by Monet's series paintings, Pissarro set up a number of easels to work simultaneously on different canvases, as light and weather conditions changed. This is one of several such views of the Place du Carrousel painted from his rooms above the Rue de Rivoli. By giving us a sidelong view and by interrupting it on all sides, Pissarro captures some of the busy city's restless activity. His quick brushwork seems to mimic the action. Scoured circles of paint trace the motion of carriage wheels. With the movement of the brush in his hand, Pissarro does not simply paint; he reenacts their rolling progress.


CASSATT

Mary Cassatt

The Boating Party, 1893/1894. Oil on canvas, .900 x 1.173 m. Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.94.


Although she was American,from a prominent Pennsylvania family, Mary Cassatt's work normally hangs with French painting. At the age of twenty-two she left to study art in France and she remained there most of her life. Her choice of career-and success-were unusual for nineteenth-century women. Her paintings were exhibited with the independent artists we now call impressionists, and she produced some of the most inventive works in their late expositions. It was through Cassatt's social contacts and wealthy friends at home that impressionist works were first acquired by progressive American collectors. Like Degas, however, Cassatt detested the term "impressionist." She relied, not on momentary inspiration, but on drawing and the careful working out of design. This bold composition-one of her most ambitious-shows her understanding of the flat, patterned surfaces, simplified color blocks, and unusual angles of Japanese prints, which were very popular in nineteenth-century Paris. The horizon is pushed to the top of the canvas, giving an oblique, bird's-eye view into the boat. Bold areas of citron and blue carve strong patterns and flatten space.


GAUGUIN

Paul Gauguin

Parau na te varua ino (Words of the Devil),1892, oil on canvas, .917 x .685 m., Gift of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation in memory of Marie N. Harriman, 1972.9.12


It is unlikely that anyone who saw this painting when it was exhibited in Paris in 1893 would have understood the Tahitian legend Gauguin inscribed on it. Its symbolism remains complex. The masked kneeling figure is the varua ino of the title, a malevolent spirit who materializes as strange and frightening human forms. The standing woman, on the other hand, is associated through her gestures evoking modesty and shame with Western images of Eve after the Fall. When Gauguin traveled to Polynesia in search of life unspoiled by civilization, he took with him a collection of photographs-of Renaissance paintings, the Parthenon, the Buddhist temple of Borobudur-and often incorporated these images in his Tahitian paintings.

Yet this is not simply a Western theme in Polynesian guise, and it is unlikely that this Eve is meant to embody guilt and remorse. Among the women of Tahiti, Gauguin discovered profound spiritual forces at work. In the Polynesian Eve he identified a channel through which spiritual energy enters the everyday world. Probably, she represents knowledge of good and evil, of life and human mortality-part of Gauguin's long dialogue with life and death. At the upper right, under the curiously serpentine red and green face, Gauguin inserts himself into the scene with the depiction of a sketchy hand, an emblem he used in self-portraits.


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This page was revised on 1/12/95