Thursday, May 18, 2017

French 19th-century Pictures from the Phillips Collection

Théodore Géricault
Two Horses
1808-1809
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Small Bather
1826
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

"Ingres was clearly fascinated by the bather's physical type, and he used the central figure in two other works painted after the one in the Phillips Collection.  Carefully lit to show off her smooth and perfect skin and the sinuously rounded, supple curves of her neck and shoulder, the curiously boneless bather suggests the icily erotic marbles by Antonio Canova, Ingres's great Italian contemporary.  Ingres studied in Paris under Jacques-Louis David and was a prodigious draftsman.  A great admirer of High Renaissance Italian painting, especially the works of Raphael, Ingres spent many years in Rome.  Duncan Phillips, a collector for whom color and painterly handling represented the highest values in painting, had no natural affinity for Ingres.  He included him in his collection as a foil to Delacroix, considering him representative of what more painterly romantics were struggling against."

 curator's notes from the Phillips Collection

The quality or characteristic that stands out most starkly in this group of paintings from the Phillips Collection is how well they match (with the one deliberate exception of the tiny Ingres). The original plutocratic couple who made these art-choices were consciously assembling a monument to their own deliberately-focused taste.  Many small museums have been and are being born from this aspiration, but few achieve this level of almost-weird family resemblance among the objects  in hue, in scale, in content, technique and even form.

Honoré Daumier
The Uprising (L'Emeute)
ca. 1848
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Eugène Delacroix
Horses emerging from the sea
1860
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Eugène Boudin
Beach at Trouville
1863
oil on panel
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Edgar Degas
La Répétition au foyer de la danse
ca. 1870-72
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
Street Scene
before 1875
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Edgar Degas
Women combing their hair
ca. 1875-76
oil on paper mounted on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Honoré Daumier
The Strong Man
1885
oil on panel
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Paul Gauguin
The Ham
1889
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Constantin Guys
A Fashionable Woman
before 1892
watercolor
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Paul Cézanne
Ginger pot with pomegranate and pears
1893
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Berthe Morisot
Two Girls
ca. 1894
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Edgar Degas
After the Bath
ca. 1895
pastel
Phillips Collection, Washington DC