Joseph Ducreux, “Le Discret (detail),” circa 1791, oil on aluminum transferred from canvas, 36 x 29 1/8 in., Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas

What’s the story behind America’s romance with 19th-century French art?

The National Gallery of Art in Washington has curated 68 paintings for a dazzling exhibition to answer that question. “America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting” tells the compelling story of how collectors, curators, dealers, and directors of the early 19th century cultivated American taste for French art. Whether it is the decorative canvases of rococo artists such as François Boucher and Jean Honoré Fragonard or the sober neoclassicism of Jacques Louis David, the exhibition brings together the best and most unusual examples of French art of that era held by American museums.

Joseph Ducreux, “Le Discret,” circa 1791, oil on aluminum transferred from canvas, 36 x 29 1/8 in., Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas
Joseph Ducreux, “Le Discret,” circa 1791, oil on aluminum transferred from canvas, 36 x 29 1/8 in., Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas

“America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting” opens on May 21 and will be on view through August 20. To learn more, visit the National Gallery of Art.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.


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Andrew Webster is the former Editor of Fine Art Today and worked as an editorial and creative marketing assistant for Streamline Publishing. Andrew graduated from The University of North Carolina at Asheville with a B.A. in Art History and Ceramics. He then moved on to the University of Oregon, where he completed an M.A. in Art History. Studying under scholar Kathleen Nicholson, he completed a thesis project that investigated the peculiar practice of embedded self-portraiture within Christian imagery during the 15th and early 16th centuries in Italy.

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