Share This Page
The Essence of Line
French Drawings from Ingres to Degas
408 pages | 195 color illustrations | 9 x 12 | 2005
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-271-02692-3 | paper: $41.95 tr
Co-published with The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum
“With its beautiful illustrations, its handsome design and layout, and its scholarly approach, this catalog and the Web site that accompanies it exemplify the wonderful things museums can do when focusing on their own collections.” —Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide
“Very full and solid, this work will be a valuable contribution to nineteenth-century studies and an essential reference for art libraries.” —Colta Ives, Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“This book catalogues and analyzes a rich ensemble of nineteenth-century French drawings, which raise important issues of collecting, connoisseurship, and taste.” —Alan Chong, Curator, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Many patrons of the arts in nineteenth-century America built collections of paintings and sculpture imported primarily from England or Italy. Collectors in Baltimore—William Walters, George Lucas, the famous Cone sisters, among others—stand out in this milieu for having developed a strikingly different aesthetic for their homes and newly founded public institutions. These collectors looked to France for models of culture and, acting upon a remarkable understanding of the educational needs and working methods of artists, assembled extensive collections of drawings by French masters, from David to Daumier, Degas, and Cézanne.
The Essence of Line offers the first comprehensive discussion of the formation of these collections and their signifcance for the history of French art. The book begins with essays by Jay M. Fisher, William R. Johnston, and Cheryl K. Snay that trace the history of collecting in Baltimore and afford new insights into the acquisition, display, and interpretation of drawings. In her essay, conservator Kimberly Schenck bridges the worlds of the collector and of the artist by examining the production and the use of drawing materials in an epoch of radical changes as much in technique as style. This book also provides a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue for one hundred of the most important of the nineteenth-century French drawings now held by The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Walters Art Museum, and the Peabody Art Collection.
Published on the occasion of an exhibition jointly organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and The Walters Art Museum, this book presents a brilliant panorama of sketches, watercolors, and presentation drawings, many of them little known outside a small circle of experts. It is correlated with an on-line archive of the entire corpus of nineteenth-century French drawings in the holdings of these Baltimore museums.
Jay M. Fisher is Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Baltimore Museum of Art.
William R. Johnston is Associate Director and Curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art at The Walters Art Museum.
Kimberly Schenck is Conservator at The Baltimore Museum of Art.
Cheryl K. Snay is Research Associate, Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at The Baltimore Museum of Art."
Contents
Foreword
Doreen Bolger and Gary Vikan
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Mise en scène
Cheryl K. Snay
A Family Collection: William and Henry Walters’ French Drawings
William R. Johnston
Collecting Nineteenth-Century French Drawings in a Twentieth-Century Museum
Jay McKean Fisher
Crayon, Paper, and Paint: An Examination of Nineteenth-Century Drawing Materials
Kimberly Schenck
Catalogue
Entries by David P. Becker, Philippe Bordes, Victor Carlson, Jay McKean Fisher , Sona Johnston, William R. Johnston, Eik Kahng, Simon Kelly, John Lambertson, Susan E. Ross, Katherine Rothkopf, and Cheryl K. Snay
Albums of Nineteenth-Century Drawings and Watercolors at the Walters Art Museum
Cheryl K. Snay
Glossary
Kimberly Schenck
Exhibitions and Catalogues
Bibliography
Index