Posts Tagged "French art"

Museum-quality paintings by Édouard Manet still remaining in private hands are exceptionally rare, and the Getty Museum is extremely fortunate in its most recent addition to the paintings collection: Manet’s Portrait of Madame Brunet, which goes on view at the Getty Center on Tuesday, December 13. A compelling work with a fascinating genesis, exhibition history, and [...]

 
Tags: 19th century painting, Diego Velázquez, Édouard Manet, French art, Getty Museum collection, Jacques Joseph Tissot, paintings collection, portraits, recent acquisitions

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Where is the line between private and public? Each situation has a different answer—and sometimes many different possible answers. As an example, take this painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Lautrec portrays a woman seen from above and behind as she sits in a chair. Her left arm and breast are bared. She gazes into the [...]

 
Tags: French art, Getty Museum collection, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Masterpiece of the Week, privacy, prostitution, Question of the Week

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For over a year now, a fashion trend from medieval Europe—once reserved for men of elite social standing—has been resurrected and adopted by women, causing some fashionistas to cringe. Tights are back. In mid-15th-century England, a law restricted the wearing of short tunics that revealed the male buttocks to members of the upper class. In works [...]

 
Tags: fashion, French art, illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, Middle Ages

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Enter Paris: Life & Luxury, closing this Sunday, and you’ll hear chimes pinging through the galleries from extravagant clocks that French aristocrats used to mark time more than two centuries ago. Download (MP3 file, 5 MB) | Length: 5:24 The ornate instruments on walls and mantels in the galleries are the very same clocks that [...]

 
Tags: 18th-century art, astronomy, clocks, French art, furniture, globes, Paris: Life & Luxury, ring tone, ringtone

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When posh Parisians in the mid-18th century greeted the day, their morning ritual wasn’t anything like our hasty shower, breakfast, and dash out the door. Their toilette, or ritual of rising and dressing, was an hours-long activity of luxurious pampering, primping, wardrobe assessment, and even worldly affairs. Yes, it was customary for elite Parisians to [...]

 
Tags: 18th-century art, French art, la toilette, Paris: Life & Luxury

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Players of backgammon, bridge, and bingo might feel a keen camaraderie with the prosperous Parisians of the 1700s whose sumptuous world is brought to life in the current exhibition Paris: Life & Luxury. The well-coiffed elite of the time relished a good card game. “Games in the 18th century were played on all levels of [...]

 
Tags: French art, gambling, Getty Museum collection, Paris: Life & Luxury

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Years ago I found myself in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a posse of 15 finance geeks in tow, enjoying respite from a college trip to study financial institutions on Wall Street. Being the only art nerd amongst the number crunchers, I had been unanimously elected to lead the other students through the Met. [...]

 
Tags: art history, birthdays, French art, Honoré Daumier

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Can an artist do justice to a beautiful woman? This sensuous terracotta bust by Joseph Chinard captures the elegance and grace of legendary beauty Juliette Récamier, a socialite renowned for her wit and notorious for her love affairs. Holding a diaphanous drapery, she covers up her right breast, but leaves her left bare. Here, she [...]

 
Tags: French art, Getty Museum collection, Joseph Chinard, Juliette Récamier, Masterpiece of the Week, portraits, Question of the Week

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For when one sees a story illustrated, whether of Troy or something else, he sees the actions of the worthy men that lived in those times, just as though they were present.    —Richard de Fournival, Bestiare d’amours, ca. 1250 The past was always within reach for medieval artists, just as it had been for their [...]

 
Tags: ancient Greece, French art, Greek art, Imagining the Past in France, medieval art, The Trojan War, Troy

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