National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | French Painting

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Sinopsis

Audio guide to works from the NGA exhibition French Paintings from the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, shown at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 7 November 2003 – 15 February 2004

Episodios

  • Jean RANC, Vertumnus and Pomona [Vertumne et Pomone] c. 1710-1720

    26/11/2007 Duración: 01min

    Vertumnus and Pomona is undoubtedly Jean Ranc’s greatest work. This beautiful painting depicts the effort of the god of gardens and orchards, Vertumnus, to woo the notoriously indifferent goddess of fruit trees, Pomona. Disguised as an old woman, Vertumnus lures Pomona into his trust with the story of a suitor who commits suicide, traumatised by the lack of attention from a beautiful, but intractable woman. The work was painted by the Montpellier-born artist shortly before his departure for Spain, where he developed a successful, life-long career as a portrait painter. Ranc’s training as a portrait painter is certainly apparent in the delicate treatment of the faces of his subjects and, more so, in the exquisitely rendered fabrics. The painting is also significant for the manner in which it presents a mythological narrative and its moral subtext in an entirely contemporary manner, as indicated in Pomona’s radiant, silky dress and parasol.

  • Noël HALLÉ, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi [Cornélie mère des Gracques] 1779

    26/11/2007 Duración: 01min

    The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote during the eighteenth century of the importance of education. Rousseau argued that all children are born ‘naturally good’, and that education and experience could cultivate and affirm this natural goodness. It was the responsibility of families and society, Rousseau found, to enable this goodness. Noël Hallé’s painting illustrates this principle with the help of an image drawn from Roman history. The widow Cornelia, daughter of a great warrior, receives an ostentatiously dressed visitor. In response to the rich fabrics and the precious jewellery of the visitor, Cornelia, referring to her children, asserts ‘These are my jewels.’ Cornelia is the supreme example of the virtuous mother, who places the emotional, intellectual and moral needs of her children above materialism. Note her simple clothing and hair and her inquisitive, upright children; two of them, Tiberius and Gaius, would go on to become great leaders.

  • Jean-Baptiste GREUZE, Epiphany [Le gâteau des rois] 1774

    26/11/2007 Duración: 57s

    Jean-Baptiste Greuze was one of Europe’s first celebrity painters. He built a reputation on instructive paintings that covered the edifying themes of the education of children, the virtues of a simple, provincial family life, and the heroism of everyday activities. Epiphany depicts a peasant family participating in the annual celebration of the gateau de roi (a Catholic feast held each year on the 6th of January), where the children search for a bean hidden in the king’s cake, the finder of which will become king for the day. Just as the philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were asking the country’s bourgeoisie to rid themselves of the distractions and trappings of civilisation – to return to nature and a moral, family life – Greuze’s Epiphany makes clear the simple (if completely illusory) pleasures of the honest, peasant family, uncorrupted by the temptations of modern, bourgeois life.

  • Jules LAURENS, The Blue Mosque, Tauris [La mosquée bleue à Tauris] 1872

    26/11/2007 Duración: 01min

    Jules Laurens undertook an incredible three-year journey throughout the Middle East and Asia Minor to Persia in the late 1840s, as part of a scientific and geographical expedition. Despite incredible hardship, Laurens drew every day. These drawings and the journey provided the basis for a significant career as an Orientalist painter and illustrator, and as a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs. This work was painted almost twenty-five years after the journey. Based on his meticulous drawings, the painting depicts a mosque near Tabriz in present-day Iran. The imposing building stands in an austere, snow-covered landscape. The painting depicts the desolate conditions of a journey marked by weather extremes and ever-present danger. The snow, while beautiful in the painting, made the journey extremely treacherous and the expedition’s leader was temporarily snow-blind.

  • Louis GAUFFIER, Vallombrosa and the Arno Valley Seen from the Paradisino [Le couvent de Vallombrosa et le val d’Arno vus du Paradisino] 1796

    26/11/2007 Duración: 57s

    Louis Gauffier’s Vallombrosa and the Arno Valley Seen from the Paradisino is a landscape that brings together a series of often competing influences and sources: close attention to the details of nature; Neo-classicism’s mathematical description of space; ‘nature’ as it was described at the time by the poet and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and, in turn, the Romantic ideal of man and nature in harmony. By bringing these disparate sources together, Gauffier produces a theatricalised landscape. The terrace in the foreground acts as a stage, beyond which the landscape is both warm and awesome, a place to wander and find one’s self, as the monk on our left indicates. The landscape unfolds in a series of layers, where men might come to recognise their democratic sensibility and their individualism.

  • François-Xavier FABRE, The Death of Narcissus [La mort de Narcisse] 1814

    26/11/2007 Duración: 49s

    In Florence to avoid revolutionary Paris, François-Xavier Fabre circulated in largely English aristocratic circles and generated a prominent reputation as a painter of portraits and landscape souvenirs for tourists. In the face of this commercial activity, he struggled to produce work that accorded with his academic training. The Death of Narcissus provides a compelling response to this conundrum. It recounts the mythological narrative of Narcissus, a handsome youth who, indifferent to the affection of others, is condemned to fall in love with his own image in a forest pool. Narcissus fades away, losing both his senses and his beauty, as he desperately attempts to possess his own image. While the work is suggestive of the Academic genre of history painting, it represents an early historical landscape. Fabre had just read Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s famous Elements of Perspective (1799–1800), which sought to elevate the landscape genre to an Academic status similar to that of history painting. Valencienne

  • François-Xavier FABRE, The Dying Saint Sebastian [Saint Sébastien expirant] 1789

    26/11/2007 Duración: 53s

    François-Xavier FABRE, The Dying Saint Sebastian [Saint Sébastien expirant] 1789, oil on canvas 196.0 (h) x 147.0 (w) cm

  • Eugène DELACROIX, Moroccans Conducting Military Exercises (Fantasia) [Exercices militaires des Marocains (Fantasia Marocaine)] 1832

    26/11/2007 Duración: 01min

    Eugène Delacroix is one of the most significant painters of the 1800s, and the greatest of the century’s Romantic painters. In early 1832, Delacroix travelled throughout Spain and the French North African colonies of Morocco and Algeria as part of a diplomatic mission. Delacroix described North Africa as a place of sensation and beauty fundamentally unlike Europe – a place, he wrote, ‘made for painters’. This is one of many paintings that resulted from this journey, and among the finest. This stirring scene – a tumultuous line of violent, turbaned Arabs charging towards some hidden enemy – had as its source a fantasia viewed by Delacroix while in Morocco: a choreographed military spectacle that is unique to Morocco, whose origin was, as its name suggests, more in the imagination than actuality. The painter’s fluid and gestural brushwork, the sharp contours and the rich palette, produce an image of the Orient as dazzling and theatrical, a wild place of dust and violence.

  • Octave TASSAERT, The Waif [L’abandonnée] 1852

    26/11/2007 Duración: 49s

    A pregnant woman faints while her lover and his young betrothed walk down the aisle. In this moral tale, Octave Tassaert drew the attention of his contemporary audience to what was understood as a wide social problem – the plight of unmarried mothers. This was a subject that seemed to concern Tassaert greatly, considering he painted it a number of times. It was also a subject that found an eager market among Parisians at the time. Indeed, Tassaert found significant success following the Revolution of 1848 with his genre scenes covering the themes of moral and economic poverty, drawn from contemporary life. These paintings collectively describe French society as one fractured by social inequality, and one where the revolutionary tenets of liberty, equality and fraternity were in need of continual reaffirmation.

  • Alfred SISLEY, Heron with Outstretched Wings [Le héron aux ailes déployées] 1867

    26/11/2007 Duración: 57s

    Even though Alfred Sisley was among the founding members of the Impressionist group, his reputation has only recently started to match his achievements. A prolific landscapist, whose technique was developed through his close association with Claude Monet and Frédéric Bazille, Sisley produced a number of still lives that bear the characteristics of his oeuvre. Heron with Spread Wings makes clear these concerns: the effects of light hitting surfaces, the commonplace or the everyday, and the tension between the factual record and subjective experience. Sisley painted this beautiful still lifealongside Bazille during a session that also included fellow Impressionist Auguste Renoir. This context makes clear to us something of the way in which the act of painting was a social activity for the Impressionists, and of the way in which the principles and techniques of the avant-garde group were formulated through these social interactions.

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