Podcasts about french painting

In this mini episode I will be analysing the painting Olympia by Édouard Manet, which was painted in 1863 and caused a huge scandal for it's salacious subject and unrefined technique. Although composed like a classical image of the Goddess Venus, this painting was thought to depict a prostitute, and was therefore considered highly problematic, due to it's contemporary display of direct brash female immorality. This also unveils the double standards in the art world as nude women has always been a hallmark in the academy and something wealthy men evidently enjoyed viewing. In this episode I will discuss the history of this work of art, why it was considered scandalous, the symbolism within the painting, Manet's artistic methods and the identities of the models, which can shed light on how women of colour were viewed. To suggest a painting and for visual references visit our instagram @themuseumoffemininity Sourceshttps://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190320-how-art-history-erased-black-peopleArt of the Western World edited by Denise HookerArt the Definitive Visual GuideWays of Seeing by John Berger

Mark and Payton analyze Barcelona's unfortunate 2-2 draw to Celta Vigo that surrenders the outright lead of La Liga to Real Madrid for the first time in over three months. Mark waxes poetic about Benzema's latest heroics as he secures all three points for Real Madrid. Also: Payton discusses the thin ice Quique Setien is on at Barcelona, and the player revolt he may have on his hands. The boys also preview Barcelona's biggest match of the restart. 

Dans ce nouvel épisode, nous plongeons dans les sphères de la sapiosexualité en associant nourritures et arts graphiques, genre tout ce qui est tableaux, cadres, photos, gravures, estampes... Tous ces trucs, quoi. Evidemment, nous ne pouvions pas entreprendre ce vaste sujet seuls, en tant que non sachants. Nous accueillons donc notre invitée, Alyx Taounza-Jeminet, historienne de l'art, avec qui nous analysons les contenus esthétiques et gastronomiques. Dans cet épisode, nous parlons de faim, d'échange colombien, de gâteaux-livres, d'absinthe, de Suède, de Flandres, de protestantisme, de bambochades, d'empattement, de péché originel, d'hyperréalisme américain et d'organes en melons et concombre. Notre corpus d'oeuvres : Le repas de noce, de Pieter Brueghel dit l'Ancien (c. 1525-1569), c. 1568, huile sur bois, exposé au Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienne (Autriche) Vertumne, de Giuseppe Arcimboldo (c. 1527-1593), 1590, huile sur toile, exposé au Château de Skokloster, Håbo (Suède) La marchande de fruits et légumes, de Louise Moillon (c. 1610-1696), 1630, huile sur toile, exposé au Musée du Louvre, Paris (France) Le Boeuf écorché, de Rembrandt (c. 1606-1669), 1655, huile sur bois, exposé au Musée du Louvre, Paris (France) Le repas frugal, de Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), 1904, estampe, exposé au Musée d'Art moderne de Paris, Paris (France) Candy counter 1969, de Sharon Core (née en 1965), 2004, épreuve chromogénique, exposé au Musée Guggenheim, New York (Etats-Unis) Et Alyx nous a laissé une bibliographie si d'aventure le sujet des relations entre nourriture et art vous intéresse et que vous voulez l'approfondir : Kenneth Bendiner, Food In Painting: From The Renaissance To The Present, Reaktion Books, 2004 Silvia Malaguzzi, Boire et Manger: Traditions et symboles, Hazan, 2006 Magalie Latry, Confrontations artistiques et féministes aux hiérarchies du genre, thèse de doctorat sous la direction de Pierre Sauvanet, Universite Michel de Montaigne - Bordeaux III, soutenue le 18 juin 2018 Allison Deutsch, Culinary Metaphor, Materiality, and Constructions of Gender in French Painting and Art Criticism, 1865-1890, thèse de doctorat sous la direction de Tamar Garb et Mechthild Fend, University College London, soutenue en 2016 Mark Clintberg, The Artist's Restaurant: Taste and the Performative Still Life, thèse de doctorat sous la direction de Johanne Sloan, Concordia University, soutenue le 15 septembre 2013 Bartholomew F. Bland et Michael Botwinick, I WANT Candy: The Sweet Stuff in American Art, Hudson River Museum, 2007 Sous la direction de Bertrand Marquer et Eléonore Reverzy, La cuisine de l'œuvre au XIXe siècle - Regards d'artistes et d'écrivains, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2019 Frédériques Desbuissons, Yeux ouverts et bouche affamée : le paradigme culinaire de l'art moderne (1850-1880), in Sociétés & Représentations 2012/2 (n°34) Jeannine Guérin Dalle Mese, Le Bibliothécaire, le Cuisinier et le Jardinier, ou Arcimboldo l'ambigu, in Italies n°4, 2000 La Grosse Bouffe est un podcast dédié au manger et au boire.Les nouveaux épisodes sortent tous les 21 du mois. Retrouvez La Grosse Bouffe sur Ausha, Apple Podcast et toutes les autres plateformes de téléchargement de podcasts. Vous pouvez également nous suivre et glisser en DM sur Twitter à @la_grossebouffe, et nous écrire à lagrossebouffepodcast@gmail.com  

First lecture from the series "Style versus the State: Naturalism and Avant-gardism in Third Republic France, 1880-1900" given by Professor Richard Thomson as part of the annual Slade Art Lectures. Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, gave the Slade Lectures 2009 in naturalism and style in early Third Republic France. This series of podcasts has been released to coincide with the publication of Professor Thomson's book on this subject: Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900.

Third lecture from the series "Style versus the State: Naturalism and Avant-gardism in Third Republic France, 1880-1900" given by Professor Richard Thomson as part of the annual Slade Art Lectures. Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, gave the Slade Lectures 2009 in naturalism and style in early Third Republic France. This series of podcasts has been released to coincide with the publication of Professor Thomson's book on this subject: Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900.

Fifth lecture from the series "Style versus the State: Naturalism and Avant-gardism in Third Republic France, 1880-1900" given by Professor Richard Thomson as part of the annual Slade Art Lectures. Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, gave the Slade Lectures 2009 in naturalism and style in early Third Republic France. This series of podcasts has been released to coincide with the publication of Professor Thomson's book on this subject: Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900.

Sixth lecture from the series "Style versus the State: Naturalism and Avant-gardism in Third Republic France, 1880-1900" given by Professor Richard Thomson as part of the annual Slade Art Lectures. Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, gave the Slade Lectures 2009 in naturalism and style in early Third Republic France. This series of podcasts has been released to coincide with the publication of Professor Thomson's book on this subject: Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900.

Seventh lecture from the series "Style versus the State: Naturalism and Avant-gardism in Third Republic France, 1880-1900" given by Professor Richard Thomson as part of the annual Slade Art Lectures. Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, gave the Slade Lectures 2009 in naturalism and style in early Third Republic France. This series of podcasts has been released to coincide with the publication of Professor Thomson's book on this subject: Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900.

Eighth lecture from the series "Style versus the State: Naturalism and Avant-gardism in Third Republic France, 1880-1900" given by Professor Richard Thomson as part of the annual Slade Art Lectures. Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, gave the Slade Lectures 2009 in naturalism and style in early Third Republic France. This series of podcasts has been released to coincide with the publication of Professor Thomson's book on this subject: Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900.

Second lecture from the series "Style versus the State: Naturalism and Avant-gardism in Third Republic France, 1880-1900" given by Professor Richard Thomson as part of the annual Slade Art Lectures. Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh, gave the Slade Lectures 2009 in naturalism and style in early Third Republic France. This series of podcasts has been released to coincide with the publication of Professor Thomson's book on this subject: Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900.

In this audio podcast, produced in conjunction with the loan of Van Gogh’s electrifying Self-Portrait from 1889 from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chief Curator Carol Togneri interviews Mary Morton, Curator of French Painting, and Ann Hoenigswald, Senior Conservator of Paintings, both from the National Gallery. The artist’s tempestuous life and brilliant talents are discussed in this fascinating interview.

Joseph-Désiré Court was trained as a history painter and portraitist. He was strongly in demand as a portrait painter in aristocratic circles and at court, especially for his paintings that placed their subject in a fantastical scene. This beautiful portrait is one of Court’s most personal. Indeed, it is most likely a painting of the artist’s wife. It is striking for the intimacy between painter and subject, which comes across in the directness of the gaze between them. The subject’s hair falls loosely from her face, her left hand holding the fabric that envelops her body. This seemingly casual pose gives a clear significance to the plain gold ring on her finger, and is balanced by the solid clear colours of the different fabrics that frame the sitter and emphasise the whiteness of her skin.

Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot trained in the Neo-classical tradition of painting, and progressively developed a highly personal vision of landscape. His stay in Italy (1825–1828) was a formative experience, since it encouraged him to study nature in the open air. In this delicate painting from the Salon of 1847, Corot has created a carefully balanced composition; the shapes of the trees leaning across the space and the surface of the river lead the eye into the painting. The work depicts the unchanged activity of fishing, yet transforms the scene into an idyllic image that emphasises the eternal harmonies between man and nature. The work is imbued with softness through the use of tone, reflection and its depiction of the sky. Corot’s influence on later painters was significant, particularly amongst the Impressionists; he was, importantly, a teacher of Berthe Morisot.

One of Gustave Courbet’s most significant canvases, Good Day, Monsieur Courbet depicts a chance meeting of the painter, his patron Alfred Bruyas and Bruyas’s servant Calas, on a road outside Montpellier. The painting teases the often fraught relationship of painter and private patron. Bruyas had trained as a painter, but poor health kept him from the practice. It is possible that Bruyas-the-patron represented a surrogate Bruyas-the-painter. In courting the country’s most astute and critically-engaged contemporary painter, Bruyas made claims to the progress of contemporary painting. The painting thus marks in the most compelling way the ambition of the collector, keen to insert his own name, taste and generosity into the history of painting. Courbet was acutely aware of this relationship. Note the way in which only Courbet stands on the earth; neither the deferential Bruyas nor Calas cast a shadow, as if only the painter, as labourer, is of this earth.

Gustave Courbet visited Alfred Bruyas in Montpellier in the summer of 1854 and during his stay went to the seaside town of Palavas, seeing the sea for possibly the first time in his life. Courbet’s independence and strength comes through in this dramatic painting, a study of flatness and light evocative of an infinite sense of space. Dominated by the line of the horizon that divides the work in half, the heavy paint builds up the surface of the shore and gives depth to the calm sea as it stretches to the distance. Perched on a rocky outcrop the single figure of a man raises his hat, as if in a greeting or celebration of the sea. This figure may be Courbet or perhaps Bruyas, and the peculiar gesture perhaps reflects the excitement of the painter’s own experience of what was for him a novel landscape.

Even though Alfred Sisley was among the founding members of the Impressionist group, his reputation has only recently started to match his achievements. A prolific landscapist, whose technique was developed through his close association with Claude Monet and Frédéric Bazille, Sisley produced a number of still lives that bear the characteristics of his oeuvre. Heron with Spread Wings makes clear these concerns: the effects of light hitting surfaces, the commonplace or the everyday, and the tension between the factual record and subjective experience. Sisley painted this beautiful still lifealongside Bazille during a session that also included fellow Impressionist Auguste Renoir. This context makes clear to us something of the way in which the act of painting was a social activity for the Impressionists, and of the way in which the principles and techniques of the avant-garde group were formulated through these social interactions.

In this important painting, Edgar Degas represents the city in a theatrical way. His nanny and young child sit on a stage, with Paris’ Luxembourg Garden dotted with strollers – those flashes of pink, ochre, black and white – as a backdrop. The painting marks the changing architectural and social conditions of Parisian life, as the city’s network of old streets and alleys was cleared to make room for the wide, sweeping boulevards (for which the city is now famous) and a series of central points of focus. The city became, as the strollers indicate, a space of leisure and spectacle: of looking and of being seen. But as with his images of laundresses, prostitutes and ballet dancers, Degas’s painting also pays attention to the contemporary conditions of women’s labour. The nursing industry underwent a boom in Paris in the 1870s, and was regulated in 1874 with a series of financial and sanitary restrictions. The nanny – already the subject of intense scrutiny within the space of the family – was now squarely under the eye of the state and the public. As a depiction of labour, indeed of the conditions of modern life, this is a highly significant example of the Realism for which Degas is famous.

Paul Guigou regularly painted the scenery of Provence in southern France, the region of his birth. This small landscape is typical of his work and captures the crisp light of the region, with its strong jewel-like colours. The painting’s raised point of view gives a sense of the emptiness of Provence. The composition is dominated by the expanse of the land and the sky, while the near perfect reflections on the river as it winds its way under the rustic stone bridge provide another focal point. Guigou came from a wealthy family and developed an early interest in landscape painting. He started his working life as a notary’s clerk but dedicated himself to painting full-time in 1862. In Paris he was friendly with many of the Impressionist group, including Frédéric Bazille, Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet. Even so, Guigou remained true to his own vision and went unnoticed at the Salon until after his death.

Eugène Isabey was a deeply Romantic painter. His work during the 1820s and 1830s is characterised by a concern with the unpredictable nature of the elements, the response of the individual to nature, and a refined, vigorous application of paint that emphasised the artist’s hand. Storm with a Shipwreck is one of Isabey’s key Romantic seascapes. He depicts the sea as an abstract force that has the power to annihilate man and his work – our attention is drawn to the corpse of a sailor and part of the wreck of his ship in the lower corner. The violent sea and clouds and the dark, ominous rocky outcrop suggest a place of absolute danger. In this way, Isabey invokes the sublime, which was so closely associated with the sea: the sea as a space of imminent threat and an incomprehensible infinitude. Isabey’s application of paint matches the subject of work; each is as theatricalised and energetic as the other.

Achille-Etna Michallon was a highly ambitious prodigy, who first exhibited at the Salon at the age of fifteen. Michallon won the inaugural Grand Prix for Historical Landscape in 1817, a prize introduced with him in mind, and one he actively lobbied the recently reformed Académie to institute. Landscape with Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos is an excellent example of Michallon’s historical landscapes, which are characterised by his faithful attention to the dramatic conditions of the elements and panoramic views, and often include isolated figures from antiquity. Michallon’s close attention to nature is apparent, but the landscape is rendered heroic. There is a Romantic passion in his depiction of the elements and of the lonely figure of Philoctetes, forced to eke out a miserable existence in the face of that violence. Thus, Michallon’s landscape suggests both the naturalism of his best student, Camille Corot, and nostalgia for the grandeur and glory of pre-Revolutionary classicism.

Frédéric Bazille was a friend of Alfred Bruyas and became an important early member of the Impressionist movement in Paris, where he was associated with August Renoir, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley among others. Bazille painted at least three different views of Aigues-Mortes near Montpellier, experimenting with different compositions and formats. While many of his early works have been lost, this rare early landscape is marked by the characteristics of the Provençal landscape tradition, including the work of Paul Guigou. The scene stretches with clarity and precision from a low point of view to great effect, the marshy foreground opening up to the fortified port town. The painting captures the glorious colours typical of the region and evokes the sensation of the different surfaces by various techniques. The painting also makes clear Bazille’s interest in using the effects of light on surfaces as a means of defining mass and form.

A pregnant woman faints while her lover and his young betrothed walk down the aisle. In this moral tale, Octave Tassaert drew the attention of his contemporary audience to what was understood as a wide social problem – the plight of unmarried mothers. This was a subject that seemed to concern Tassaert greatly, considering he painted it a number of times. It was also a subject that found an eager market among Parisians at the time. Indeed, Tassaert found significant success following the Revolution of 1848 with his genre scenes covering the themes of moral and economic poverty, drawn from contemporary life. These paintings collectively describe French society as one fractured by social inequality, and one where the revolutionary tenets of liberty, equality and fraternity were in need of continual reaffirmation.

Eugène Delacroix is one of the most significant painters of the 1800s, and the greatest of the century’s Romantic painters. In early 1832, Delacroix travelled throughout Spain and the French North African colonies of Morocco and Algeria as part of a diplomatic mission. Delacroix described North Africa as a place of sensation and beauty fundamentally unlike Europe – a place, he wrote, ‘made for painters’. This is one of many paintings that resulted from this journey, and among the finest. This stirring scene – a tumultuous line of violent, turbaned Arabs charging towards some hidden enemy – had as its source a fantasia viewed by Delacroix while in Morocco: a choreographed military spectacle that is unique to Morocco, whose origin was, as its name suggests, more in the imagination than actuality. The painter’s fluid and gestural brushwork, the sharp contours and the rich palette, produce an image of the Orient as dazzling and theatrical, a wild place of dust and violence.

Its pristine finish, sharp lines and sober palette place Alexandre Cabanel’s Albaydé at the heart of academic excellence. Indeed, the Montpellier-born Cabanel – a Prix de Rome winner in 1845 – was one of the last ardent academicians, determined to maintain the Académie’s strictures and hierarchies in the face of the radical challenges to it posed by, among others, Gustave Courbet. The subject is drawn from Victor Hugo’s Orientalist poem ‘Fragments of a Serpent’, where the poet lusts for ‘the lovely doe-like eyes of Albaydé’. In a manner that owes much to Ingres’s languid nudes, Cabanel has depicted the lethargic figure of Albaydé as an object of visual pleasure, and also as an allegory. Albaydé was prepared as part of a triptych, the theme of which was the precariousness of the passage from youth to adulthood. Albaydé represented youthful innocence gone askew. It is compelling that she is depicted as a seductive, if dishevelled Oriental courtesan, in a space suggestive of the Islamic lounge, a harem and an opium den.

A winner of the Prix de Rome in 1704, Jean Raoux became famous for his depictions of Vestal Virgins. These paintings described the virtues of chastity and maidenhood, an image he often contrasted with that of the modern bourgeois women, whose excesses and narcissism were at odds with moral virtue. Raoux’s reputation became such that the philosopher Voltaire described him as the equal of the great Dutch painter Rembrandt. Dido and Aeneas suggests Raoux’s interest in Rembrandt and other Northern European painters. Note the attention paid to particular surfaces, especially the exquisite rendering of the satin (an effect for which Raoux was well known), and its broad range of lights and darks. These influences are distilled with Raoux’s observations of Italian painting, made while resident in Rome, where he studied and copied the finest moments of classical antiquity and Renaissance painting. The scene itself, a moment from Virgil’s account of the fateful love of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, and the founder of Rome, Aeneas, is rendered in terms closer to everyday life than classical antiquity.

The central theme of François-André Vincent’s moving painting Belisarius is tolerance. The subject of the work is the illustrious Roman general who, according to legend, was wrongly accused of conspiracy against the emperor Justinian, blinded and forced to lead an itinerant life as a beggar. This was a popular subject at the time among both painters and writers. The painting records the moment when the pitiable Belisarius is recognised by one of his former soldiers. The soldier’s shame at finding himself in the presence of the maligned general is palpable. Through this painting Vincent sought to propagate tolerance and unity, during a period of intense political and social upheaval shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution of 1789.

Jean-Louis Demarne’s career was not that of a powerful Academician. He was instead a painter who actively sought out and capitalised on the taste of middle-class collectors. Influenced by the highly finished landscapes and genre scenes of Dutch painters currently in vogue among Parisian collectors, Demarne’s landscapes and genre scenes found an eager audience in France and abroad. A Ferry and Boats on a Canal is an excellent example of Demarne’s picturesque depictions of everyday rural life. It uses the compositional convention of a central vanishing point that became something of a trademark for the painter. The landscape itself is quite generic, it could be Holland, Flanders or Northern France. Demarne is an important example of a commercially-minded artist who generally resisted participation in contemporary politics in favour of the private patronage of the burgeoning middle class.

Léon-François Bénouville's splendidly modelled figure of Achilles intrudes into the space of the viewer. He literally steps beyond the surface of the canvas. Thus, in the painting's careful attention to the human form and in the precision of its modelling of paint, it fulfils ideally the task of the painted academic figure studies required of Prix de Rome winners. Bénouville's painting of Achilles, a popular subject for nineteenth-century painters, shows the Greek hero at the moment where, after quarrelling with his leader, Agamemnon, he retreats from battle to his tent in a rage. Humiliated, Achilles refuses to continue fighting with the Greeks, who subsequently suffer a series of catastrophic defeats. As Agamemnon's envoys enter Achilles' tent, in the hope of convincing him to return to battle, Achilles springs to his feet, launching into a tirade. With a dramatic realism, Bénouville renders this precise, violent moment.

Due largely to the fact that he spent much of his adult life working outside of the country, and because of the very flexible nature of his work, which often shifted dramatically between styles and themes, Sébastien Bourdon’s work has often been ignored in France. Bourdon was, it was thought, a chameleon, whose skill was more in mimicry than innovation. But as the comprehensive exhibition of his work at the Musée Fabre in 2000 demonstrated, Bourdon’s career is now regarded somewhat differently. Painted in the last years of his life, The Lamentation brings forward many of the painter’s fine attributes: dense, clear colours, emphatic modelling of form, and a dynamic composition that crystalises a series of often competing references, including Nicolas Poussin. As Bourdon often instructed his students, great innovation could be achieved by casting one’s interests far and wide.

Nicolas Poussin is one of France’s greatest painters. Venus and Adonis is an important example of the mythologies he painted in Rome during the 1620s. In Rome, the artistic centre of Europe, Poussin absorbed the lessons of classical antiquity and the Italian masters. Poussin’s innovation was to merge these influences with an often astonishing realism, refined through extended on-site study of nature and the figure. Venus and Adonis presents an idyllic depiction of the ancient world. Seen at sunset, Venus and Adonis share their love in a landscape peopled with cherubim. Both landscape and figures are painted with a free and light touch. In this way, nature weaves all together: the humid haze of the Italian summer evening, the vibrant sun that dances indiscriminately over and warms foliage and bodies, and the lovers. However, scholars have determined that the original painting was cut in two, the left hand side showing a river god in a landscape is now in a private collection. This might account for the enigmatic nature of the Musée Fabre’s painting and its narrative, where a series of figures, seemingly lost in worlds of private pleasure, are both entangled in the richly described landscape yet isolated from each other.

Simon Vouet’s Allegory of Prudence is one of the Musée Fabre’s most significant paintings. It is remarkable as much for its formal bravado – its contorted arabesque lines, its statuesque forms, its dramatic lighting effects – as for its historical importance. Allegory of Prudence was painted for the recently widowed Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, as part of a large commission to decorate the Palais Royal, Paris (1643–1647). The ambitious Regent – at the time the subject of a series of scandals, including a rumour that she had secretly married the powerful, scrupulous Cardinal Jules Mazarin – is depicted as the figure of Prudence, one of the four Cardinal Virtues from classical and religious texts. The beautiful, virtuous Regent is seen untroubled by the effects of the material world, whether the passage of time personified by the old man at her feet or politics and skulduggery, which she is literally above.

Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of Alphonse Leroy is widely recognised as among the painter’s greatest portraits. In its sobriety, its scientific attention to surface effects and details, and its effort to produce an image of its sitter as psychologically complex, it forms a direct line to his many later, exceptional depictions of Napoleon Bonaparte. David’s portrait of Leroy says as much about the social identity of the figure of the artist as it does about its subject. In his sparsely furnished study, wearing a turban, and taking notes from his copy of Hippocrates’ The Diseases of Women, the gynaecologist is seen as something of an ascetic genius. So, in turn, is the artist; he is, as the contemporary definition of genius asserted, one gifted with powers of close observation and the ability to imitate nature above those of ordinary men and women.

François-Xavier FABRE, The Dying Saint Sebastian [Saint Sébastien expirant] 1789, oil on canvas 196.0 (h) x 147.0 (w) cm

Joseph-Marie Vien presented this sketch in a six-part submission for pre-selection for the 1743 Prix de Rome. Based on the unresolved nature of the paintings, it was a surprise to many that Vien was deemed eligible for competition and eventually won the prize. While this was reflective of the declining state of the Prix, with its unfashionable privileging of history painting at the expense of the pastorals and allegories that had become fashionable, the award was prophetic. Vien would become France’s most highly awarded painter and its leading teacher, and one of the earliest exponents of the Neo-classical style. The subject of Vien’s painting suggests something of this historical context. Joshua, a disciple of Moses and his successor, leads the Israelite invasion of Canaan and the Promised Land. During a final, fraught battle for the town of Gibeon, Joshua prays for extended daylight so as to assure what would become a great victory.

In Florence to avoid revolutionary Paris, François-Xavier Fabre circulated in largely English aristocratic circles and generated a prominent reputation as a painter of portraits and landscape souvenirs for tourists. In the face of this commercial activity, he struggled to produce work that accorded with his academic training. The Death of Narcissus provides a compelling response to this conundrum. It recounts the mythological narrative of Narcissus, a handsome youth who, indifferent to the affection of others, is condemned to fall in love with his own image in a forest pool. Narcissus fades away, losing both his senses and his beauty, as he desperately attempts to possess his own image. While the work is suggestive of the Academic genre of history painting, it represents an early historical landscape. Fabre had just read Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s famous Elements of Perspective (1799–1800), which sought to elevate the landscape genre to an Academic status similar to that of history painting. Valenciennes argued for landscape painting that was both highly learned and paid close attention to the study of nature. Fabre’s canvas represents an important example of an historical landscape, painted two years before the Académie in Paris created a special Grand Prix for the genre.

Louis Gauffier’s Vallombrosa and the Arno Valley Seen from the Paradisino is a landscape that brings together a series of often competing influences and sources: close attention to the details of nature; Neo-classicism’s mathematical description of space; ‘nature’ as it was described at the time by the poet and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and, in turn, the Romantic ideal of man and nature in harmony. By bringing these disparate sources together, Gauffier produces a theatricalised landscape. The terrace in the foreground acts as a stage, beyond which the landscape is both warm and awesome, a place to wander and find one’s self, as the monk on our left indicates. The landscape unfolds in a series of layers, where men might come to recognise their democratic sensibility and their individualism.

Jules Laurens undertook an incredible three-year journey throughout the Middle East and Asia Minor to Persia in the late 1840s, as part of a scientific and geographical expedition. Despite incredible hardship, Laurens drew every day. These drawings and the journey provided the basis for a significant career as an Orientalist painter and illustrator, and as a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs. This work was painted almost twenty-five years after the journey. Based on his meticulous drawings, the painting depicts a mosque near Tabriz in present-day Iran. The imposing building stands in an austere, snow-covered landscape. The painting depicts the desolate conditions of a journey marked by weather extremes and ever-present danger. The snow, while beautiful in the painting, made the journey extremely treacherous and the expedition’s leader was temporarily snow-blind.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was one of Europe’s first celebrity painters. He built a reputation on instructive paintings that covered the edifying themes of the education of children, the virtues of a simple, provincial family life, and the heroism of everyday activities. Epiphany depicts a peasant family participating in the annual celebration of the gateau de roi (a Catholic feast held each year on the 6th of January), where the children search for a bean hidden in the king’s cake, the finder of which will become king for the day. Just as the philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were asking the country’s bourgeoisie to rid themselves of the distractions and trappings of civilisation – to return to nature and a moral, family life – Greuze’s Epiphany makes clear the simple (if completely illusory) pleasures of the honest, peasant family, uncorrupted by the temptations of modern, bourgeois life.

Vertumnus and Pomona is undoubtedly Jean Ranc’s greatest work. This beautiful painting depicts the effort of the god of gardens and orchards, Vertumnus, to woo the notoriously indifferent goddess of fruit trees, Pomona. Disguised as an old woman, Vertumnus lures Pomona into his trust with the story of a suitor who commits suicide, traumatised by the lack of attention from a beautiful, but intractable woman. The work was painted by the Montpellier-born artist shortly before his departure for Spain, where he developed a successful, life-long career as a portrait painter. Ranc’s training as a portrait painter is certainly apparent in the delicate treatment of the faces of his subjects and, more so, in the exquisitely rendered fabrics. The painting is also significant for the manner in which it presents a mythological narrative and its moral subtext in an entirely contemporary manner, as indicated in Pomona’s radiant, silky dress and parasol.

Popularly known as ‘Robert des Ruines’, Hubert Robert built a lucrative career out of his imaginary ancient towns, cities, museums and gardens in picturesque decay. The Bridge is one such fantastical image, depicting the château in Dieppe populated by figures going about their everyday lives – a woman bathing, men herding livestock across an ancient, imaginary bridge. Robert’s work was deeply influenced by his time in Rome during the 1750s to 1760s, a place he described as a city of ruins and of everyday life, where decaying mementoes of history (the Forum, the Colosseum) and contemporary life rubbed shoulders. Rome was also in the middle of an archaeological fever, spurred in part by the discovery of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, sites Robert visited in 1760. The painting represents a memento mori; a reminder, as one critic noted at the time, that everything must die.

The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote during the eighteenth century of the importance of education. Rousseau argued that all children are born ‘naturally good’, and that education and experience could cultivate and affirm this natural goodness. It was the responsibility of families and society, Rousseau found, to enable this goodness. Noël Hallé’s painting illustrates this principle with the help of an image drawn from Roman history. The widow Cornelia, daughter of a great warrior, receives an ostentatiously dressed visitor. In response to the rich fabrics and the precious jewellery of the visitor, Cornelia, referring to her children, asserts ‘These are my jewels.’ Cornelia is the supreme example of the virtuous mother, who places the emotional, intellectual and moral needs of her children above materialism. Note her simple clothing and hair and her inquisitive, upright children; two of them, Tiberius and Gaius, would go on to become great leaders.