The Metropolitan Museum of Art news release

For release Communications Department 1000 Fifth Avenue Immediate New York, NY 10028-0198 tel 212-570-3951 Contact fax 212-472-2764 email [email protected] Elyse Topalian Sabina Potaczek

Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of

Exhibition dates: October 8, 2003 - January 4, 2004 Exhibition location: Tisch Galleries, second floor Press preview: Tuesday, October 7, 10:00 a.m.—noon

Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism, a groundbreaking exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 8, 2003, will fully explore for the first time the important exchange of art and ideas that originated between France and England during the decades following the fall of Napoleon in 1815 - a crucial period that saw the full flowering of the Romantic revolution. The exhibition, which remains on view through January 4, 2004, will bring together major works by artists such as Constable, Bonington, J.M.W. Turner, Delacroix, and Gericault, all of whom played a key role in this unprecedented dialogue across the English Channel and between the two national schools.

The exhibition is made possible by United Technologies Corporation.

The exhibition was organized by Tate Britain, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Whereas traditional views have tended to stress the impact that eatly 19th-century French painters had on their British counterparts, Crossing the Channel reveals the important influence that English innovations - notably a new emphasis on pure , the experimental, impressionistic techniques of the English watercolorists, and the works (more) Crossing the Channel Page 2 of the British Romantic writers - exerted on French art at this time. The selection of approximately 140 paintings and works on paper - garnered from more than 40 collections worldwide - includes such icons of Romantic art as Turner's A Disaster at Sea; Constable's The White Horse and View on the Stour near Dedham (both never before loaned by their host institutions), and Gericault's first study for .

With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the restoration of peace, French and English civilians could, for the first time in almost 20 years, cross the Channel in safety. Among them were artists, connoisseurs, and collectors, eager to rediscover and explore the culture of their erstwhile enemies.

Following the end of the Napoleonic regime, however, a conviction also grew that the 18th-century Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, confidence, and order - given artistic expression in the smooth perfection of the Neoclassical style - were no longer valid. A new array of attitudes and aesthetic sensibilities - which came to be called Romanticism - now celebrated extremes of emotion, the irrational, and the power of nature to awe and inspire.

This need to break with the past and explore new modes of expression was felt keenly on both sides of the Channel. While French artists - led by the twin titans of Eugene Delacroix and Theodore Gericault - became the supreme exponents of Romantic painting, their achievement depended importantly on the example of contemporary English art and culture.

Organized thcmatically, Crossing the Channel explores the affinities and exchanges between British and French painters in terms of subject matter, sources of inspiration, and technical innovations. The exhibition also examines the cultural, commercial, and political events that fostered this artistic dialogue, focusing especially on the crucial period from 1820 to 1840. (more) Crossing the Channel Page 3

For example, visitors will have the opportunity to see key works, reunited for first time in almost two centuries, from the Salons of 1824 and 1827 - nicknamed the "English Salons" because of the preponderance of British pictures on view. Prominent among them is Constable's View on the Stour near Dedham (1822, The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens) - one of the artist's famous "six-footers" - whose majestic scale and bold naturalism caused a sensation at the Salon of 1824. Also on view will be Thomas Lawrence's Portrait of Master Charles William Lambton (1825, private collection), one of the stars of the Salon of 1827 and greatly admired by the French for its "Byronic" qualities. Delacroix's Portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter (ca. 1826, The National Gallery, ), with its poetic mood and suave handling of paint, has been regarded as an homage to Lawrence.

One of the defining moments in the English perception of French Romantic painting was the 1820 exhibition in London of Gericault's colossal image of shipwreck and despair, The Raft of the Medusa (1819, Musee du , Paris [not in the exhibition]), which attracted some 40,000 visitors - among them England's own master of marine disasters, J.M.W. Turner. The sensational impact of this event will be reconstructed through the display of a number of Gericault's studies in oil and watercolor for the work, as well as a full-scale replica made by French Academicians (1859-60, Musee de Picardie, Amiens) of the 16-by-23-foot original.

The exhibition also explores the pivotal role played by the expatriate English artist as a mediator between the developing schools of French and British Romantic painting. A close friend of Delacroix, with whom he once shared a studio, Bonington also knew and studied the works of Lawrence and Turner. Important examples of his marine views, remarkable for their luminous palette and free handling of paint, include French Coast with Fisherman (ca. 1825, private collection), the first of hispaintings exhibited in London, and A Fishmarket near Boulogne (1824, Yale Center for British Art), which was awarded a medal in Paris at the "English Salon" of 1824. (more) Crossing the Channel Page 4

Contemporary British writers, particularly Byron and Sir , played a pioneering role in the Romantic movement, and the exhibition fully documents the important impact their works had on artists on both sides of the Channel. The most famous of Delacroix's many illustrations of Byronic themes, The Death of Sardanapalus (1827, Musee du Louvre [not in the exhibition]), is represented by a reduced version of the painting (ca. 1846, Philadelphia Musum of Art), created by the artist for himself, prior to selling the original to an English collector. Quintessentially Romantic in its exoticism and harrowing violence, it shows the king of ancient Assyria witnessing his dying wish - the slaughter of his slaves, harem, and horses.

Works inspired by the historical romances of Scott include Edwin Henry Landseer's The Hunting of Chevy Chase (1825-26, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery), Bonington's Quentin Durward at Liege (1828, City Museums and Galleries), and Camille Roqueplan's Maree dEquinoxe (The Antiquary) (1826, Chi Mei Museum, Taiwan).

Scott's evocative novels also inspired a vogue for so-called genre-historique paintings, which sought to recreate historical events in a realistic and compellingly human manner. The exhibition includes one of the most masterful examples by a French artist, Paul Delaroche's The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833, The National Gallery, London). The poignant scene of the beautiful young English queen, blindfolded and kneeling before the executioner's block, was one of the most popular works in the Paris Salon of 1834.

The English predilection for illustrating scenes from contemporary life, particularly of the lower classes, was also taken up by the French, as evidenced in works such as Louis- Leopold Boilly's Moving Day (1822, The Art Institute of Chicago).

Above all, it is in the field of landscape painting that the English influence on French art was the most profound and far-reaching, extending even to the origins of .

(more) Crossing the Channel Page 5

Works by and the painters Theodore Rousseau, and Jules Dupre, with their immediacy, chromatic brilliance, and atmospheric effects, are clearly indebted to the examples of Constable and Turner.

Turner and other English artists were also pioneers in the use of watercolor as an expressive medium, and their innovations encouraged the revival of the watercolor tradition in France. Roqueplan's A Shipwreck (ca.1825-30, Musee des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle, ), with its fluid brushwork and emphasis on the terrifying forces of nature, is Turneresque in both technique and subject matter.

The curator of the exhibition is Patrick Noon, Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Painting at The Minneapolis Museum of Art, and principal author of the catalogue. Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator of 19th-century European Painting, organized the exhibition at the Metropolitan, with the assistance of Kathryn Calley Galitz, Research Associate. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism, published by Tate Publishing.

Crossing the Channel has already been on view at Tate Britain, London, and The Minneapolis Museum of Art.

A variety of educational programs will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition, including gallery talks. Two slide-illustrated lectures on various aspects of Romanticism in French and British paintings by scholars Robert Rosenblum of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Patrick Noon of The Minneapolis Museum of Art will take place on Sunday, December 7, 3:00-5:00 p.m., in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. These programs are free to the public with Museum admission.

(more) Crossing the Channel Page 6

An Audio Guide of the exhibition will be available; the fee for rentals will be $5.00 for members of the Museum, $6.00 for non-members, and $4.00 for children under 12.

The Audio Guide program is sponsored by Bloomberg.

The exhibition will be featured on the Museum's Web site, wwrw.metmuseum.org.

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July 25, 2003

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