Posts Tagged "French art"

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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More than 60 people sit, chat, and play in this elaborate composition outside the entrance to the Jardin Turc, or Turkish Garden Café, in early-1800s Paris. The café was known for its spacious gardens, exotic pavilions, and excellent ice cream, but the painter, Louis-Léopold Boilly, shares with us only the exterior wall of this famed [...]

 
Tags: French art, Getty Museum collection, Louis-Léopold Boilly, Masterpiece of the Week, Question of the Week, the gaze

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In the French Middle Ages, as today, banquets were opportunities for the well-heeled to entertain guests in style. The set-up was simple: boards placed on trestles topped with white cloths, wine diluted with water in clay vessels, meats on five-day-old slabs of bread serving as rustic plates. Forks were absent. Meals began and ended with [...]

 
Tags: cooking, culinary workshops, food, food events, French art, Imagining the Past in France, medieval art, Middle Ages, recipes

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Nowadays, seeing a silly picture of a person is hardly unusual. Showing personality is a good thing. Social customs weren’t quite the same in 18th-century France, when Joseph Ducreux painted this self-portrait. An official court painter, he was known for refined portraits of important figures such as Marie Antoinette. But he also created unusual depictions of [...]

 
Tags: French art, Getty Museum collection, humor, Joseph Ducreux, Masterpiece of the Week, portraits, Question of the Week, self-portraits

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When you visit a museum, it’s easy to forget that objects have a story, a journey from where they began to where they are now. Take Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s portrait of the composer Albert Cahen d’Anvers. It’s one of the most beloved paintings in the Getty Museum’s collection. But who wanted Cahen d’Anvers on canvas? And [...]

 
Tags: Edmund de Waal, French art, Getty Museum collection, Getty Perspectives, history, Jewish history, lectures, netsuke, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, provenance

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Even though it’s been more than a decade, I remember it as though it were yesterday. Like so many art history students, I made my first pilgrimage to the Louvre—tantamount to mecca for an art nerd like me—to feast my eyes and nourish my soul. Wall-to-wall tourists, numbering close to 15,000 on an average day, [...]

 
Tags: 19th century painting, French art, Getty Museum collection, Louvre, portraits, Théodore Géricault

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Today is  the 262nd birthday of Jacques-Louis David, the French painter best known for his austere Neoclassical paintings such as Oath of the Horatii. David was as political an artist as ever lived. He was a leader of the French Revolution, a prominent member of the radical Jacobin party, and a close friend of leader [...]

 
Tags: birthdays, French art, Getty Museum collection, Jacques-Louis David, Neoclassicism

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