Our shopping cart is temporarily out of service. To order, please call our toll free number. 800-326-9180. Thank you.
Valenciennes,
Daubigny and the Origins of French Landscape Painting
By
MichaelMarlais, John Varriano,
and Wendy M. Watson
Distributed
by the Penn State Press for the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
January 2005 | 11 x 8.5 inches
64 pages | 68 illustrations
Art History
Paperback: $20.00 SH
ISBN: 978-0-9721222-0-7
"Though one may stay in Rome for many years, finally one
has to return home." —Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes
French painters have historically taken to landscape with a zeal
unmatched by artists of any other nationality. This volume traces
the history of that engagement with nature from the late Renaissance,
when landscape painting first emerged from the background of narrative
representation, up to the eve of Impressionism in the nineteenth
century. French artists faced many choices as they made their way
through the rural landscape. John Varriano‚s essay emphasizes the
role the classicizing Italianate idiom of Poussin and Claude played
in the French imagination for much of that time. Pierre-Henri de
Valenciennes, who was for landscape painting what Jacques-Louis
David was for history painting, constitutes a major turning point
in that tradition. Wendy Watson‚s essay explores the intellectual
foundations of his work and his renewal of the classical legacy
in landscape painting.
With time, French landscape painters came to question the authority
of the inherited tradition. Michael Marlais's essay not only demonstrates
that Charles-Fran¯ois Daubigny was central to that conceptual change
but also explains the reasons artists began rethinking, while not
totally abandoning, classical formulas.
Valenciennes, Daubigny, and the Origins of French Landscape
Painting contains 30 color illustrations as well as a checklist
of the 2004 exhibition at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum that
occasioned its publication.
Michael
Marlais is the James M. Gillespie Professor of Art History
at Colby College. He is the author of Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-SiËcle
Parisian Art Criticism (Penn State, 1992).
John Varriano is the Idella Plimpton Kendall Professor
of Art History at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Italian
Baroque and Rococo Architecture (1986), Rome, A Literary
Companion (1991), and Caravaggio and the Art of Realism (forthcoming, Penn State).
Wendy M. Watson is curator of the Mount Holyoke College
Art Museum. She is the author of Italian Renaissance Maiolica
from the William A. Clark Collection (1986), Italian Renaissance
Ceramics from the Howard I. and Janet H. Stein Collection and the
Philadelphia Museum of Art (2001), and the co-author of Summit:
Vittorio Sella, Mountaineer and Photographer, The Years 1879Ì1909 (1999).
