New Book | French Art of the Eighteenth Century
Distributed by Yale UP:
Heather MacDonald, ed., French Art of the Eighteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-0300220179, $25.
This beautiful book brings together ten years of research on a superb collection of 18th-century French masterworks, which was formed by the late Michael L. Rosenberg and is now on deposit at the Dallas Museum of Art. This research, originally presented in lectures at the museum by an impressive roster of scholars and curators of European art, combines close studies of individual paintings by such artists as François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Louis Léopold Boilly with rich accounts of the historical, cultural, and political climates of their time. The works, many of which have not yet been widely published, span elegant portraits, intimate genre paintings, erotic canvases depicting mythological themes, and bloody images of the hunt. Through careful reconstructions of the lives of these artworks—from their first audiences to their contexts of display—the essays in this book unfold the history of a century of French art.
Heather MacDonald is program officer at the Getty Foundation.
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C O N T E N T S
• Walter Elcok, Foreword
• Lawrence Barzune, Dedication to Michael L. Rosenberg
• Philip Conisbee, Michael L. Rosenberg’s Eighteenth Century
• Kathleen Nicholson, Beguiling Deception: Allegorical Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century France
• Mary D. Sheriff, Love Hurts: On the Pleasures and Perils of Love in Eighteenth-Century French Art
• Mary Tavener Holmes, Nicolas Lancret and Tale of Three Collectors
• Amy Freund, Good Dog! Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the Politics of Animal Painting
• Christoph Martin Vogtherr, Moving on from Watteau: Jean-Baptiste Pater and the Transformation of the Fête Galante
• Alastair Laing, Artist in a Garret: The Young Boucher in Rome
• Deborah Gage, Fired by Passion: Michael L. Rosenberg’s Sèvres Tableau and the French Royal Prerogatives of Ceramics and Stag Hunting
• Eik Kahng, Greuze’s The Dreamer: Portrait, Tronie, or Fantasy Figure?
• Aileen Ribeiro, The Mirror of History: The Art of Dress in Late Eighteenth-Century France
• Susan L. Siegfried, Louis-Leopold Boilly: Between Genre and Portraiture
• Anne L. Poulet, On the Run: Clodion’s Bacchanalian Figures
Bibliography
Index
Photography and Copyright Credits
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The DMA celebrates the book with a lively evening of events on Thursday, October 27, from 5:00 to 9:00pm . . .
Annual Fête: Celebrating French Art of the 18th Century
Dallas Museum of Art, 27 October 2016
Step back in time to 18th-century France at the inaugural Annual Fête celebrating French painting and sculpture from the Michael L. Rosenberg Collection. Arrive in style with an 18th-century–inspired costume for a chance to win a copy of French Art of the Eighteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art and two tickets to the upcoming exhibition Art and Nature in the Middle Ages.
Performance
18th-century music from members of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
Self-Guided Tour
Depart on a grand tour of art from our global collection made during the 18th century.
Talk — Greuze’s The Dreamer: Portrait, Tronie, or Fantasy Figure?
7:00pm Heather MacDonald shares a brief history of the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation before introducing Eik Kahng, contributor to the new Michael L. Rosenberg Collection catalogue.
Curator Q&A in the Galleries
8:00pm Heather MacDonald, Nicole Myers, and Eik Kahng answer questions about the Rosenberg Collection.
Lecture | Mr. Boswell Goes to Corsica
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From The Lewis Walpole Library:
David A. Bell | Mr. Boswell Goes to Corsica: Charismatic
Authority in the Age of Democratic Revolutions
22nd Lewis Walpole Library Lecture
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 6 October 2016
David Bell’s lecture examines how new ways of imagining political leadership emerged during the Enlightenment, across the Atlantic world, using as a case study the way the Corsican independence leader Pasquale Paoli become an unexpected hero in Britain and its American colonies. He then speculates on how these ways of imagining political leadership helped shape the character of the great Atlantic revolutions of the century’s end. The lecture (held in the Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall and starting at 5:30pm on Thursday, October 6) is free and open to the public.
David A. Bell, Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University, is a historian of early modern France with a particular interest in the political culture of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. He earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1991. Prior to joining Princeton’s faculty in 2010, he taught at Yale University (1990–96) and at Johns Hopkins University, where he held the Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Humanities and served as dean of faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of five books including, most recently, Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is currently working on a comparative and transnational history provisionally entitled “Men on Horseback: Charismatic Authority in the Age of Democratic Revolutions.” He is also a frequent contributor to general-interest publications on a variety of subjects ranging from modern warfare to the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship.
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