Conservatives and Rebels. 19th-Century French Painting and Sculpture from the State Hermitage Collection

The display will introduce visitors to works from the Hermitage’s collection of 19th-century French art – one of the most striking and representative in the world. Exhibits include the creations of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Gustave Corbet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and more.

The history of French painting in the 19th century can be viewed as a shift from the Neo-Classicism of Napoleon’s empire, through Romanticism to Realism, then on to the sketch-like art of the Impressionists and the new painterly approaches of the Post-Impressionists. The exhibition that the Hermitage is presenting at the Vrubel Museum in Omsk does not contradict that vector. At the same time, the display shows that the actual picture was more complicated: French art in the 1800s did not develop in a linear fashion. Throughout the century, each successive movement did not abolish nor devalue previous tendencies. Exponents of academic art and innovators could be working at the same time. Conceptions of the beauty and quality of a work of art, and of the goals that painters might set themselves, did not replace one another, but they did expand.

More than 50 paintings have been selected for the exhibition, giving the opportunity to see the full extent of stylistic diversity, as well as 27 sculptures in bronze, marble and terracotta. All the main genres of art are featured: genre and history painting, depictions of animals, the portrait and the still life.

Throughout the 19th century, portraiture took the lead when it came to private commissions. Elegance, aristocratic refinement and natural, albeit touched-up, good looks were the qualities with which clients were invested on canvas. One of the earliest examples in the exhibition is Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of Léontine de Rivière, painted by the artist when she was 75 years old. The benchmark for the formal portrait in the mid-1800s was set by the works of Franz Xaver Winterhalter – a superb painter who was especially popular among the high society of Saint Petersburg and the Romanov family.

The early 19th century saw the first appearance in France of artists who made their native countryside the theme of their creative work. In the early 1820s, a sort of colony of landscape painters formed in the village of Barbizon by the Forest of Fontainebleau. In sketches that they then converted into finished pictures, they recorded the edges of the forest, clearings, paths and country roads. The Barbizon School is represented in the exhibition by works by Jules Dupré, Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña, and Charles-Émile Jacque.

The Barbizon artist Constant Troyon preferred to paint animals. He was responsible for the appearance, first at the Paris Salon, and then in the collections of prominent officials and Emperor Napoleon III himself, of close up depictions of cows. One of these can be seen in the exhibition, as well as the exotic Animals Quarel--, an entertaining little scene painted by Victor Bachereau-Revershon in the spirit of 17th-century Flemish art.

Prominent “animaliers” in sculpture were Antoine-Louis Barye, Pierre-Jules Mène and Isidore-Jules Bonheur, and their works can also be seen in the halls. They are founded upon the attentive study of the anatomy, characters and behaviour of different creatures.

In the middle of the 19th century, interest arose in the relative recent, yet irrecoverably lost world of the old France. Subjects from the repertoire of the Age of Gallantry came into vogue. Examples of pictures belonging to this tendency are Emile Béranger’s Engraver’s Workshop, Auguste Toulmouche’s Girl Reading a Book and Edouard Louis Dubufe’s Lovelace Abducting Clarissa Harlowe (inspired by one of the 18th century’s most famous moralistic novels). Besides that, both painters and sculptors produced historical reconstructions of a sort. Works of this type included François Flameng’s Court Ladies Bathing.

In sculpture, the historical style is demonstrated by the bronze groups Charles Martel in Battle with the Saracens by Jean-François-Théodore Gechter and Napoleon on Horseback by Alfred d’Orsay, and the historical portrait genre by terracotta busts of Shakespeare and Milton made by Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. The marble bust of a Bacchante and the statue of Cupid Begging by Prosper d'Épinay are superb examples of the Salon art from the second half of the 19th century.

Painters who turned their hand to sculpture most often employed in three dimensions the themes and subjects that they had previously expounded in two. This holds entirely true for the oeuvre of Jean-Léon Gérôme (Plaudite Cives, a depiction of a gladiator who has defeated a lion in the arena) and for the celebrated Edgar Degas (Dancer), who even considered that sculpture could convey any movement more precisely. Degas regarded his own little figurines made in wax from life as preparatory sketches and never exhibited them. It was only after the artist’s death that they were translated into bronze and became widely known.

By the middle of the 19th century, there was an evident tendency among French artists, both painters and sculptors, to depict the world around them in a realistic manner. A prominent representative of this trend in sculpture was Aimé-Jules Dalou, whose Farmworker Rolling Up His Sleeve can be seen in the exhibition.

The oeuvre of Auguste Rodin, represented by the marble group Cupid and Psyche cannot be confined within the bounds of any one style or tendency – Realism, Impressionism or Expressionism. It rounds off the 19th century and opens up new horizons for the art of the following period.

Everything innovative in 19th-century French art was an act of rebellion, often provoking a scandal, a revolt against the Academy and adherence to ossified tradition. And at the same time a revolt against public opinion and accepted taste in painting. Each successive generation looked on their predecessors as classic figures to be learnt from, but also to be argued with.

Gustave Courbet was one of the first to throw down the gauntlet to the Academy and the entire artistic establishment. The author of the Realist Manifesto saw his primary task as being to convey the morals, ideas and appearance of his time in his own assessment, to produce living art. Enthusiasm for his paintings was a phase in the development of many artists of the following generation – the Impressionists.

They were the ones that came forward as true painters of the present day. Their arrival in art became a turning point in the history of not only French, but the whole of European painting. Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Egdar Degas were not united in either their views on art or their methods of working, but their were linked by a striving to paint not historical paintings that had grown distasteful but their own time in all its diversity. They changed conceptions of the purposes of paintings and painters for ever.

Visitors will learnt about the stylistics of Post-Impressionism from paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cėzanne. Van Gogh’s expressiveness, Gauguin’s decorativeness and Cėzanne’s constructional approach acted as catalysts for the emergence of new tendencies in 20th-century art, such as Expressionism, Fauvism and Cubism.

The exhibition curators are researchers from the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art, Natalia Dyomina and Yelena Karcheva.

A scholarly illustrated catalogue in Russian has been produced for the exhibition – Konservatory I buntari, Frantsuzskaia zhivopis’ I skul’ptura XIX veka iz sobraniia Ermitazha with a foreword by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage. The introductions and annotations are by Alexander Babin, Candidate of Art Studies, Natalia Dyomina and Yelena Karcheva, Candidate of Art Studies.