Enfilade

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From the Städel Museum:

Jean-Jacques de Boissieu: A Contemporary of Städel’s / Ein Zeitgenosse Städels
Städel Museum, Frankfurt, 11 February — 10 May 2015

Curated by Jutta Schütt

Self-Portrait of Jean-Jacques de Boissieu, 1796, etching.

Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736–1810) was already a highly acclaimed artist beyond France in his lifetime. Not only princes but also private collectors like Johann Friedrich Städel were fascinated with the landscapes, genre scenes, and portraits depicted in the artist’s drawings and prints. The founder of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut acquired over twenty drawings and far more than two hundred etchings by de Boissieu, which still rank among the central holdings of the Städel’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Created in a period of historically revolutionary events, de Boissieu’s oeuvre mirrors the landscape and life of the province around the artist’s native city of Lyon with an almost irritatingly unexcited and serious steadiness. His etched landscapes and portraits as well as his subtly nuanced brush and chalk drawings reveal a progressive realism that hints at a bourgeois understanding of art independent of any academic norms.