During the final decades of the ancient regime, prominent collectors in Paris commissioned and collected French paintings of the period, works by Greuze, Fragonard, David and others that together comprised 'l'Ecole Francoise' - the French School. In this book, an art historian discusses six of these collectors and the collections they assembled, showing that private patronage in this period was revitalized by this patriotic desire to collect contemporary art.Colin B. Bailey explains why a taste for modern art emerged at this time and how it was encouraged and fostered. Examining the relationship between artist and patron, he discusses the degree of influence these enlightened patrons and collectors expected to exercise when new works were being commissioned. Bailey shows that collectors of eighteenth-century French painting seem not to have made rigid distinctions between the various genres or styles of the Academy's practitioners. Instead, history paintings and genre paintings - both rococo and neo-classical - were exhibited proudly on their walls as superb examples of the French School.

Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris

Arts & Photography

Bailey, Colin B.

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

This inviting book offers the first comprehensive survey of French genre painting of the eighteenth century, from Watteau’s fêtes galantes to Boilly’s paintings of modern Parisian life. Showcasing 113 works, the book illustrates the variety and the vitality of genre painting throughout the period. Leading English, German, French, and American scholars shed light on the development of genre painting, its interpretation, its collectors, and its enormous appeal. Here are gathered together masterpieces by such eminent artists as Watteau, Lancret, de Troy, Chardin, Boucher, Greuze, Fragonard, Robert, and Boilly. The wide range of their featured works encompasses military scenes, theatrical subjects, hunt pictures, pastorals, domestic life, moral pictures, fishwife subjects, paintings for the boudoir, and panoramas of the Enlightenment in landscapes and townscapes. Each work is thoroughly catalogued, and an appendix lists all genre paintings shown in the eighteenth-century Salons.

The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting

Conisbee, Philip

Gaehtgens, Thomas W.

Painting

Magnificent full-length impressionist paintings by Renoir capture the glamorous spirit and refined milieu of Belle Époque Paris Throughout his long working life, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) produced large-format portraits and subject pictures. From the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s—the decade of Impressionism—his vertical, grand-scale canvases were among the artist's most daring and ambitious presentations of contemporary life and fashion. Today they rank among the masterpieces of Impressionism. This stunning book offers fresh insights into Renoir's complex ambitions as a young artist, when he submitted works to both the avant-garde impressionist exhibitions and the official Salon. While painting in the new impressionist style, Renoir remained committed to the full-length format, which was eschewed by most of his fellow impressionists as too traditional. This format afforded Renoir the opportunity to devote himself to the heroic painting of everyday life, and also to linger on the finest details of his figures' fashionable costumes and accessories. Ten iconic canvases display the rich variety of this artist's painterly technique. They reveal the sheer virtuosity of his brushwork in creating silk, lace, mink, and taffeta for shimmering ball gowns, sumptuous furs, chic Parisian day dresses, and glamorous theatrical costumes. These paintings capture the faces and fashions of Renoir's Paris.
Extensively illustrated, the book draws upon contemporary criticism, literature, and archival documents to explore the motivation behind Renoir's full-length figure paintings, and technical studies of the canvases shed new light on the artist's working methods.

Renoir: Impressionism and Full-Length Painting

Celebrates one of the giants of French Impressionism with luxurious, large-format images
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was one of the founders of Impressionism and a friend of Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. He worked side-by-side with Monet on the banks of the Seine, sharing his concern with light and colour, but landscape painting never displaced his enduring love of figure painting. Delighting in the ample curves of the nudes he painted increasingly frequently in his later years, Renoir was also a master at capturing the spirit of Parisian life.
His art is filled with optimism - his lifelong philosophy was that he painted because it gave him pleasure, and he shares that pleasure with those who see his work. It is almost always summer in his pictures, and in paintings like Moulin de la Galette, The Dance at Bougival and The Luncheon of the Boating Party he gives us an enduring record of contemporaries relaxing and enjoying their leisure.

Renoir: Classic 2015

GAUNT, WILLIAM

Phaidon Press

Filled with spectacular reproductions of the great Austrian painter's best work, this celebration of the visionary Vienna artist traces his influence on modernism and post-modernism.

Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making

Klimt, Gustav

Individual Artists

Harry N. Abrams

Of all the Impressionist artists, only Pierre Auguste Renoir earned distinction as a professional portrait painter. For more than fifty years Renoir explored the genre of portraiture, experimenting and pressing forward in his determination to become -- as he explained to Monet in 1884 -- "a painter of figures". This sumptuously illustrated book is the first devoted exclusively to Renoir's portraiture, and in it are gathered the finest examples of the portraits he painted during each period of his prolific career. In these delightful paintings Renoir creates uniquely endearing and enduring images of pleasure, comfort, and prosperity.
In introductory essays, the authors investigate Renoir's career as a portrait painter, the importance of portraiture within the work of his fellow Impressionists, and one of Renoir's keenest collectors -- a man who commissioned two portraits of his wife and was part of the milieu that sustained the artist in the middle years of his career. In addition, Colin Bailey has reconstructed the biographies of all the figures represented in the portraits in this volume and offers new information on the families and subsequent careers of Renoir's subjects, drawing on unpublished sources in Parisian and provincial archives and on material discovered in the collections of subjects' descendants. Previously unpublished photographs of Renoir's models are also included, underscoring the high degree of authenticity and fidelity to .appearances that is the hallmark of Renoir's portrait style. Renoir Portraits is not only a feast for the eye, it is sure to become the standard book on the subject for years to come.

Renoir's Portraits Impressions of An Age

Heavily influenced by Symbolism and Art Nouveau, Gustav Klimt developed a controversial and highly personal style that combines decorative pattern with a mysterious and powerful sexuality. This book, reproducing 40 paintings and 90 works on paper, focuses on him within his Viennese milieu, his place within the Symbolist movement and his international influence.

Gustav Klimt, Modernism in the Making

National Gallery of Canada

COLLINS, John.

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

Bringing the famed Parisian illustrator to light, this biography centers on Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, who studied at the prestigious Royal Academy but failed to win the coveted Prix de Rome. The study relates that the subject reacted to this disappointment by throwing aside all hopes of a traditional artistic career and hastening out into the thoroughfares of Paris to sketch everything in sight, living an errant, bohemian existence and succumbing increasingly to an obsession with drawing. Detailed and engaging, this recollection demonstrates that, despite his personal eccentricities, Saint-Aubin was employed as an artist all his life.

Gabriel De Saint : Aubin 1724-1780

ROSENBERG, Pierre

de Beaumont, Kim

Folds McCullagh, Suzanne

Leribault, Christophe

Somogy Art Publishers

Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection

Galassi, Susan Grace, and Maria van Berge-Gerbaud

The Frick Collection and Fondation Custodia

Fragonard's Progress of Love at The Frick Collection

Fragonard's Progress of Love at the Frick Collection

Frick Collection

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