Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun, Hubert Robert. 1788. Oil on oak panel. H. 105; l. 84 cm. Musée du Louvre © RMN - Grand Palais / Jean-Gilles Berizzi Though French artist Hubert Robert’s name doesn’t resonate like those of his compatriots Chardin and Fragonard, in his day he was celebrated for his poetic views of architectural ruins. Robert’s diverse fans ranged from Louis XVI and Catherine the Great to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson. Co-organized by the Louvre and National Gallery of Art, “Hubert Robert: a Visionary Painter” reintroduces this 18th century artist with some 140 works -- beautiful red chalk drawings, painted sketches, engravings, capricci, large paintings, and decorative and garden designs (Louvre, Paris; March 9 to May 30; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; June 26 to October 2). “The feeling and the conviction is that Hubert Robert is much more than just “Robert of the Ruins,” says exhibition curator Guillaume Faroult of the Louvre’s Read More
Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France
“Only in painting have I found happiness,” Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun confided at the end of her long, prolific career. Though Vigée Le Brun’s high society portraits earned her great fame during her lifetime, her sentimental style fell out of fashion and she largely dropped off the radar. Her long overdue retrospective, “Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (February 15 to May 15, 2016). Organized at the Met by Katharine Baetjer, curator in the department of European paintings, the exhibition follows Vigée Le Brun’s singular career chronologically -- from Paris to her peripatetic years as an émigré artist and return to France. According to Baetjer, preparation for the exhibition confirmed Vigée Le Brun’s technical skills. “Her works on both canvas and panel are exceptionally well preserved and, as far as one can know, seem to look much as they did when they were painted.” We first meet the artist in a terracotta Read More
Konstantin Makovsky: The Tsar’s Painter
In the late 19th century, traditional Russian culture enjoyed a revival. Among the artists to reimagine his country’s idealized past was Konstantin Makovsky, the subject of a new monograph survey at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington, D.C. (February 13 to June 12). Organized by Wilfried Zeisler, Hillwood’s associate curator of nineteenth-century art, Wendy Salmond, professor of art and art history at Chapman University and Russell E. Martin, professor of history at Westminster College, “Konstantin Makovsky: The Tsar’s Painter” explores the artist’s career and popularity in Russia and America. The Moscow-born son of an amateur painter and a composer, Makovsky briefly joined the Wanderers, a group of social realists who left St. Petersburg’s Academy of Arts. Choosing security, he became a professor at the Academy and launched a successful career with his flattering portraits of Russian high society. After the death of his first wife, Makovsky traveled to Egypt Read More
Sublime Beauty: Raphael’s Portrait of a Lady With a Unicorn
For centuries, an unsigned portrait of a beautiful young woman at Rome's Galleria Borghese remained shrouded in mystery. Now a focus exhibition at San Francisco's Legion of Honor, Sublime Beauty: Raphael's "Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn" brings the enigmatic teenager to the U.S. for the first time with a new theory about her identity (January 9 to April 10). "Inexplicably magnetic, it stops you in its tracks," says Esther Bell, the show's organizer and curator of European Painting at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "It's a beautifully balanced painting and one of Raphael's most beautiful portraits." First recorded in the Borghese collection in 1682, "Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn" was misattributed to a number of artists, including Pietro Perugino and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Further clouding matters, in the mid-17th century, an unknown artist changed the sitter into St. Catherine, covering her bare shoulders with a cloak and replacing the small unicorn in her lap Read More