: "Rococo to Romantic: European Art from the Permanent Collection"
is on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, August
29-December 12.
A survey of movements from the mid-Eighteenth through the
mid-Nineteenth Centuries, this installation assembles sculpture,
decorative arts and drawings to complement the paintings, all
from the Wadsworth Atheneum's collection.
Early in the Eighteenth Century, European fine and decorative
arts turned from dark styles and weighty subjects toward
brightness, sprightliness and delicacy in the era known as the
Rococo. Instead of religious themes, artists and patrons
preferred genre and mythological scenes, portraiture, still lifes
and scenic views. Featured in the Atheneum's collection are the
Italian masters Batoni, Tiepolo, Bellotto and Piazetta and the
French painters Hubert Robert, Bouilly and Chardin.
In the wake of the French Revolution, the style and subject
matter of art turned austere and neoclassical. The leading
exponent of this new sobriety was Jacques-Louis David, whose
workshop produced the Atheneum's version of his famous "The
Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons." Following in
David's footsteps came Ingres, who led the mid-Nineteenth
Century's classical approach; Ingres is represented in the
collection by a gemlike medieval scene and an incisive portrait
of the Duc d'Orleans.
Ingres's precise forms were countered by the rise of the Romantic
movement, represented among the Atheneum's paintings by its
leading French representatives, Delacroix and Gericault. Since
the Romantic movement was by no means limited to France, other
diverse examples on view include a naval subject by the prominent
English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, and a recently
acquired romantic landscape "Thunderstorm on Lake Chiemsee" by
the German artist George Heinrich Crola.
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is at 600 Main Street.
For information, 860-278-2670 or www.wadsworth atheneum.org.
