Georges de La Tour's haunting depiction of a repentant Mary Magdalen
gazing into a mirror by candlelight; Jean Siméon Chardin's perfectly
balanced image of a young boy making a house of cards; Jean Honoré
Fragonard's monumental suite of landscapes showing aristocrats at play
in picturesque gardens--these are among the familiar and beloved
masterpieces in the National Gallery of Art, which houses one of the
most important collections of French old master paintings outside
France. This lavishly illustrated book, written by leading scholars and
the result of years of research and technical analysis, catalogues
nearly one hundred paintings, from works by François Clouet in the
sixteenth century to paintings by élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun in the
eighteenth.
French art before the revolution is characterized by an astonishing
variety of styles and themes and by a consistently high quality of
production, the result of an efficient training system developed by the
traditional guilds and the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture,
founded in 1648 by King Louis XIV. The National Gallery collection
reflects this quality and diversity, featuring excellent examples by all
the leading painters: ideal landscapes by Claude Lorrain and biblical
subjects by Nicolas Poussin, two artists who spent most of their careers
in Rome; deeply moving religious works by La Tour, Sébastien Bourdon,
and Simon Vouet; portraits of the grandest format (Philippe de
Champaigne's Omer Talon) and the most intimate (Nicolas de
Largillierre's Elizabeth Throckmorton); and familiar scenes of daily
life by the Le Nain brothers in the seventeenth century and Chardin in
the eighteenth. The Gallery's collection is especially notable for its
holdings of eighteenth-century painting, from Jean Antoine Watteau to
Hubert Robert, and including marvelous suites of paintings by François
Boucher and Fragonard. All these works are explored in detailed,
readable entries that will appeal as much to the general art lover as to
the specialist.
