This course examines the history of French art chronologically, from the 17th century through modern art, focusing on works conserved in Parisian museums. The course begins at the Musée du Louvre with Nicolas Poussin (17th century) and ends with the historical avant-gardes, passing by neo- classicists (David), romanticists (Géricault, Delacroix), realists (Courbet, Manet), and impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Degas), among others. Each site visit focuses on a work of art, historical movement, or an artist in particular, and takes place at various museums of Paris from the most famous to the most private, and the most traditional to the most original.
Method of presentation:
Lectures and required site visits to museums during which students take notes
Required work and form of assessment:
Attendance and participation (20%); written commentary on a work of art (five pages plus a detailed bibliography) and a 10-minute oral presentation of the commentary (20%); midterm exam (descriptions of images and questions based on class sessions) (20%); four 10-minute tests every three weeks based on notes and readings (20%); final exam (20%).
content:
I. Classical Painting, Academic Painting
1. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Nicolas Poussin, Autoportrait, 1650
Nicolas Poussin is rightly considered the master of classical art in France. With this work, the artist links a genre, portrait, and a traditional painting motif, the painter’s workshop.
Reading: Victor Cousin, “Poussin, peintre de la pensée,” 1854, pp. 224-230.
2. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Charles Le Brun, L’Entrée d’Alexandre dans Babylone (1665), Le Passage du Granique, La Bataille d’Arbelles, and Alexandre et Porus
Charles Le Brun was a founder of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1648. Le Brun succeeded in imposing some of Poussin’s classical theories as doctrines. These four very large
paintings were presented at the Salon of 1673 and included in the collections of Louis XIV. The compositions were later transformed into tapestries at the Manufacture des Gobelins, which was
managed by Le Brun.
3. Site Visit: Institut de France, Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris
The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Salons, teaching of classical painting.
II. Rococo
4. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Watteau, Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, 1717
Watteau’s originality and growing celebrity enabled him to enter the Académie and five years later, he painted his masterpiece, Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère.
Reading: Jules and Admond de Goncourt, “Le grand poète du XVIIIe siècle est Watteau,” 1860.
5. Site Visit: Musée Jacquemart-André
François Boucher, Le sommeil de Vénus, 1734
The Musée Jacquemart-André was home to a collector whose entire life was dedicated to his passion for bringing together remarkable works of art from the 18th century (Fragonard, Boucher, Chardin).
III. Neo-classicism
6. Mini-test 1
Introduction to neo-classicism
Text analysis: Hugh Honour, Le Néo-classicisme, 1998 (extracts)
The British art historian Hugh Honour emphasizes that the terms “neo-classic” and “classic” were not used at the end of the 18th century. Critics, theorists, and artists spoke simply of “true style,” seeing
a new Renaissance, a reaffirmation of timeless truths.
7. Site Visit: Louvre Museum
David, Le Serment des Horaces, 1784
A student of Boucher, Jacquet-Louis David created for the Count of Angiviller Le serment des Horaces, which shows a return to the classical painting of Poussin but also something more rigid: painting must illustrate a certain number of examples taken from Roman narratives such as love of country or individual heroism. With these Roman ideals, David became the official painter of the Revolution.
8. Site Visit: Musée Carnavalet
David, Le Serment du jeu de Paume, 1789
The political role of Jacquet-Louis David, painter of the Revolution.
9. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Ingres, La Baigneuse de Valpinçon, 1808
A student of David, Ingres distinguished himself from the strictly neo-classic style. La Baigneuse de
Valpinçon denotes his willingness to break with the classical ideal. The work is characterized, however, by a respect for one of the fundamental rules of classical art: drawing is the probity of art. The artist is thus the opposite of Delacroix.
Reading: Ingres, “Du dessin,” 1994, pp. 41-50, and “De la couleur, du ton et de l’effet,” 1994, pp.
51-56; Delacroix, “Couleur,” pp. 41-46.
10. Site Visit: Petit Palais
David, Mort de Sénèque, 1773; Ingres, La mort de Léonard de Vinci, 1818
The first is a work of David’s youth for his second showing at the Prix de Rome (refused work). The second is an atypical work of Ingres that nonetheless reveals his preference for the troubadour genre
of the Middle Ages and his admiration for Leonardo de Vinci.
IV. Romanticism
11. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Géricault, Le radeau de la méduse, 1816 ; Delacroix, la Mort de Sardanapale, 1826
Reading: Charles Baudelaire, “Qu’est-ce qu’est le romantisme.”
12. Mini-test 2
Alain Jaubert, Delacroix, La Liberté guidant le peuple, Palette
La Liberté guidant le peuple is the most famous painting of the leader of the Romantic school. Lecture and text analysis
Reading: Extracts from Delacroix’s Journal
12. Site Visit: Musée Delacroix and Saint Sulpice Church
Visit of Delacroix’s last workshop and the frescos of Saint Sulpice, where Delacroix had been commissioned to decorate a chapel in 1847.
V. Realism
13. Site Visit: Musée d’Orsay: Gustave Courbet, Un enterrement à Ornans, 1849 and L’atelier du peintre, 1855
Gustave Courbet became one of the most well-known painters of his century while Paris was the global capital of the arts. His art created the rupture with Académicism and enabled the freedom of the subject and the motif that succeeded the dawning of Impressionism.
14. Site Visit: Musée d’Orsay: Manet, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863; Manet, Olympia, 1863; Cabanel,
La naissance de Vénus, 1863
The Salon des Refusés was created in 1863 to appease numerous painters rejected by the official Salon. Manet presented Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, a painting that was judged indecent and caused a scandal. Another scandal was caused by Olympia, a work of art that was accepted at the official Salon two years after its creation. On the contrary, the work of Cabanel, purchased by Napoléon III, reflected the official art of the period.
Reading: Various authors on the Salon des Refusés (1863 texts) and on Manet’s Olympia (1865 texts).
15. Midterm exam
VI. The Barbizon School
16. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre: The French countryside: Rousseau, Dupré, Paul Huet, Decamps, Flers, Cabat, Diaz, Troyon, Chintreuil, Daubigny.
The Barbizon school was one of the most important stages in the history of the countryside in the
19th century. Related works at the Louvre are viewed in order to better grasp the importance and the role of the Barbizon School, particularly on the Impressionists.
Reading: Paul Jamot, "Corot, Rousseau et le paysage en France vers 1830," 1923, pp. 588-595.
17. Site Visit: Musée d’Orsay: Millet, Les Glaneuses, 1857; Corot, La danse des nymphes, ca. 1860-65.
Millet created paintings of a classical realism of monumental proportions (les Glaneuses, 1857; l'Angélus, 1858-1859) that make one think of Poussin. During the 1860’s, he turned more and more towards the countryside, like Théodore Rousseau, the other master of Barbizon. La Danse des nymphes is a pure marvel of luminous grace that contributed to confirming the renown of Corot (1796-1875) and earning him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. This was the pinnacle of Corot’s career.
VII. Impressionism
18. Site Visit: Musée Marmottan: Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil levant, 1874
Claude Monet’s painting entitled Impression, soleil levant was a view of a port where boats on the water, barely visible, appeared across a transparent mist that lit up the red sun. The title Impression corresponded to a rapid and light touch and blended contours. This work brought about a formula for the new art and, by its title as well as by its craftsmanship, gave birth to the expression that seemed to best characterize the artists that represented it, the Impressionists.
Reading: Théodore Duret, Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, 1939 (extract).
19. Site Visit: Musée de l’Orangerie: Monet, Les Nymphéas, 1917-1926
From 1914 to 1926, Monet painted the water garden on his property of Giverny, surrounded by trees and decorated with aquatic plants, in front of which, over a period thirty years, the painter set up his easel to explore changing rhythms. The paintings evoked the passing of the hours, from daybreak in the east to sunset in the west.
20. Musée d’Orsay: Renoir, Le moulin de la Galette, 1876; Degas, Au café, 1875-77; Monet,
Cathédrale de Rouen, 1893
Three works of art and three artists emblematic of impressionism.
21. Mini-test 3
Analysis of Théodore Duret’s text on impressionism
Théodore Duret, Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, 1939 (extract)
VIII. After Impressionism
22. Site Visit: Musée d’Orsay: Seurat, Le cirque, 1890-91
The circus theme was frequently treated during the 1880’s, particularly by Renoir, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. But Cirque, far from any anecdotal vision of modern entertainment, presented itself as one of the most impressive applications of the devisionist theories. Seurat interpreted theories of Charles Henry on the psychological effects of line and color as well as those of the laws of optical blending of color formulated by Chevreul and Rood.
Reading: Paul Signac, "D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme," 1898.
23. Site Visit: Musée Gustave Moreau: Gustave Moreau, Jupiter et Sémélé, 1895
For Moreau, as for Vinci and Poussin with whom he liked to compare himself, painting is mental. It does not try to recreate on the canvas the spectacle of nature; it first addresses the spirit and comes from deep within the artist.
IX. The Historical Avant-Gardes
24. Mini-test 4
History of the perspective of the Renaissance to Cézanne and Picasso
Picasso, Les demoiselle d’Avignon, 1907, MOMA, New York
25. Musée d’Art Moderne of the City of Paris: fauvism and cubism
Reading: Apollinaire, “Les cubistes,” 1911; Apollinaire, “Du sujet de la peinture moderne,” 1912; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, L’apparition du cubisme, 1920
26. Final exam
Required readings:
(included in course reader)
Apollinaire, “Du sujet de la peinture moderne,” Les soirées de Paris. 1912.
Apollinaire, “Les cubistes,” L’Intransigeant. Paris, October 10, 1911.
Baudelaire, Charles. “Qu’est-ce qu’est le romantisme,” Curiosités esthétiques, le salon de 1845, texts by Henri Lemaître, les Classiques Garnier, Paris.
Cousin, Victor. “Poussin, peintre de la pensée,” Du vrai, du beau et du bien. Edition including an appendix on French art by Victor Cousin. Paris: Didier, 1854.
De Goncourt, Jules and Edmond. “Le grand poète du XVIIIe siècle est Watteau,” in L'art du XVIIIe siècle,
1860.
Delacroix, “Couleur,” in Dictionnaire des beaux-arts. Paris: Ed. Hermann, 1996.
Duret, Théodore. Histoire des peintres impressionnistes. Paris: Floury, 1939.
Honour, Hugh. Le Néo-classicisme. Paris: Hachette Livre, Livre de poche, 1998.
Ingres. “Du dessin” and “De la couleur, du ton et de l’effet,” Ecrits sur l’art. Paris: La Bibliothèque des
Arts, Paris, 1994.
Jamot, Paul. "Corot, Rousseau et le paysage en France vers 1830," Revue de Paris, Year 30, Vol. 1, February 1, 1923.
Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry. L’apparition du cubisme. Munich, 1920.
Signac, Paul. "D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme," La Revue blanche, Vol. 16, Paris, 1898.
Various authors on the Salon des Refusés (1863 texts) and on Manet’s l’Olympia (1865 texts).
Paris Museums
This course examines the history of French art chronologically, from the 17th century through modern art, focusing on works conserved in Parisian museums. The course begins at the Musée du Louvre with Nicolas Poussin (17th century) and ends with the historical avant-gardes, passing by neo- classicists (David), romanticists (Géricault, Delacroix), realists (Courbet, Manet), and impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Degas), among others. Each site visit focuses on a work of art, historical movement, or an artist in particular, and takes place at various museums of Paris from the most famous to the most private, and the most traditional to the most original.
Lectures and required site visits to museums during which students take notes
Attendance and participation (20%); written commentary on a work of art (five pages plus a detailed bibliography) and a 10-minute oral presentation of the commentary (20%); midterm exam (descriptions of images and questions based on class sessions) (20%); four 10-minute tests every three weeks based on notes and readings (20%); final exam (20%).
I. Classical Painting, Academic Painting
1. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Nicolas Poussin, Autoportrait, 1650
Nicolas Poussin is rightly considered the master of classical art in France. With this work, the artist links a genre, portrait, and a traditional painting motif, the painter’s workshop.
Reading: Victor Cousin, “Poussin, peintre de la pensée,” 1854, pp. 224-230.
2. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Charles Le Brun, L’Entrée d’Alexandre dans Babylone (1665), Le Passage du Granique, La Bataille d’Arbelles, and Alexandre et Porus
Charles Le Brun was a founder of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1648. Le Brun succeeded in imposing some of Poussin’s classical theories as doctrines. These four very large
paintings were presented at the Salon of 1673 and included in the collections of Louis XIV. The compositions were later transformed into tapestries at the Manufacture des Gobelins, which was
managed by Le Brun.
3. Site Visit: Institut de France, Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris
The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Salons, teaching of classical painting.
II. Rococo
4. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Watteau, Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère, 1717
Watteau’s originality and growing celebrity enabled him to enter the Académie and five years later, he painted his masterpiece, Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère.
Reading: Jules and Admond de Goncourt, “Le grand poète du XVIIIe siècle est Watteau,” 1860.
5. Site Visit: Musée Jacquemart-André
François Boucher, Le sommeil de Vénus, 1734
The Musée Jacquemart-André was home to a collector whose entire life was dedicated to his passion for bringing together remarkable works of art from the 18th century (Fragonard, Boucher, Chardin).
III. Neo-classicism
6. Mini-test 1
Introduction to neo-classicism
Text analysis: Hugh Honour, Le Néo-classicisme, 1998 (extracts)
The British art historian Hugh Honour emphasizes that the terms “neo-classic” and “classic” were not used at the end of the 18th century. Critics, theorists, and artists spoke simply of “true style,” seeing
a new Renaissance, a reaffirmation of timeless truths.
7. Site Visit: Louvre Museum
David, Le Serment des Horaces, 1784
A student of Boucher, Jacquet-Louis David created for the Count of Angiviller Le serment des Horaces, which shows a return to the classical painting of Poussin but also something more rigid: painting must illustrate a certain number of examples taken from Roman narratives such as love of country or individual heroism. With these Roman ideals, David became the official painter of the Revolution.
8. Site Visit: Musée Carnavalet
David, Le Serment du jeu de Paume, 1789
The political role of Jacquet-Louis David, painter of the Revolution.
9. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Ingres, La Baigneuse de Valpinçon, 1808
A student of David, Ingres distinguished himself from the strictly neo-classic style. La Baigneuse de
Valpinçon denotes his willingness to break with the classical ideal. The work is characterized, however, by a respect for one of the fundamental rules of classical art: drawing is the probity of art. The artist is thus the opposite of Delacroix.
Reading: Ingres, “Du dessin,” 1994, pp. 41-50, and “De la couleur, du ton et de l’effet,” 1994, pp.
51-56; Delacroix, “Couleur,” pp. 41-46.
10. Site Visit: Petit Palais
David, Mort de Sénèque, 1773; Ingres, La mort de Léonard de Vinci, 1818
The first is a work of David’s youth for his second showing at the Prix de Rome (refused work). The second is an atypical work of Ingres that nonetheless reveals his preference for the troubadour genre
of the Middle Ages and his admiration for Leonardo de Vinci.
IV. Romanticism
11. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre
Géricault, Le radeau de la méduse, 1816 ; Delacroix, la Mort de Sardanapale, 1826
Reading: Charles Baudelaire, “Qu’est-ce qu’est le romantisme.”
12. Mini-test 2
Alain Jaubert, Delacroix, La Liberté guidant le peuple, Palette
La Liberté guidant le peuple is the most famous painting of the leader of the Romantic school. Lecture and text analysis
Reading: Extracts from Delacroix’s Journal
12. Site Visit: Musée Delacroix and Saint Sulpice Church
Visit of Delacroix’s last workshop and the frescos of Saint Sulpice, where Delacroix had been commissioned to decorate a chapel in 1847.
V. Realism
13. Site Visit: Musée d’Orsay: Gustave Courbet, Un enterrement à Ornans, 1849 and L’atelier du peintre, 1855
Gustave Courbet became one of the most well-known painters of his century while Paris was the global capital of the arts. His art created the rupture with Académicism and enabled the freedom of the subject and the motif that succeeded the dawning of Impressionism.
14. Site Visit: Musée d’Orsay: Manet, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863; Manet, Olympia, 1863; Cabanel,
La naissance de Vénus, 1863
The Salon des Refusés was created in 1863 to appease numerous painters rejected by the official Salon. Manet presented Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, a painting that was judged indecent and caused a scandal. Another scandal was caused by Olympia, a work of art that was accepted at the official Salon two years after its creation. On the contrary, the work of Cabanel, purchased by Napoléon III, reflected the official art of the period.
Reading: Various authors on the Salon des Refusés (1863 texts) and on Manet’s Olympia (1865 texts).
15. Midterm exam
VI. The Barbizon School
16. Site Visit: Musée du Louvre: The French countryside: Rousseau, Dupré, Paul Huet, Decamps, Flers, Cabat, Diaz, Troyon, Chintreuil, Daubigny.
The Barbizon school was one of the most important stages in the history of the countryside in the
19th century. Related works at the Louvre are viewed in order to better grasp the importance and the role of the Barbizon School, particularly on the Impressionists.
Reading: Paul Jamot, "Corot, Rousseau et le paysage en France vers 1830," 1923, pp. 588-595.
17. Site Visit: Musée d’Orsay: Millet, Les Glaneuses, 1857; Corot, La danse des nymphes, ca. 1860-65.
Millet created paintings of a classical realism of monumental proportions (les Glaneuses, 1857; l'Angélus, 1858-1859) that make one think of Poussin. During the 1860’s, he turned more and more towards the countryside, like Théodore Rousseau, the other master of Barbizon. La Danse des nymphes is a pure marvel of luminous grace that contributed to confirming the renown of Corot (1796-1875) and earning him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. This was the pinnacle of Corot’s career.
VII. Impressionism
18. Site Visit: Musée Marmottan: Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil levant, 1874
Claude Monet’s painting entitled Impression, soleil levant was a view of a port where boats on the water, barely visible, appeared across a transparent mist that lit up the red sun. The title Impression corresponded to a rapid and light touch and blended contours. This work brought about a formula for the new art and, by its title as well as by its craftsmanship, gave birth to the expression that seemed to best characterize the artists that represented it, the Impressionists.
Reading: Théodore Duret, Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, 1939 (extract).
19. Site Visit: Musée de l’Orangerie: Monet, Les Nymphéas, 1917-1926
From 1914 to 1926, Monet painted the water garden on his property of Giverny, surrounded by trees and decorated with aquatic plants, in front of which, over a period thirty years, the painter set up his easel to explore changing rhythms. The paintings evoked the passing of the hours, from daybreak in the east to sunset in the west.
20. Musée d’Orsay: Renoir, Le moulin de la Galette, 1876; Degas, Au café, 1875-77; Monet,
Cathédrale de Rouen, 1893
Three works of art and three artists emblematic of impressionism.
21. Mini-test 3
Analysis of Théodore Duret’s text on impressionism
Théodore Duret, Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, 1939 (extract)
VIII. After Impressionism
22. Site Visit: Musée d’Orsay: Seurat, Le cirque, 1890-91
The circus theme was frequently treated during the 1880’s, particularly by Renoir, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. But Cirque, far from any anecdotal vision of modern entertainment, presented itself as one of the most impressive applications of the devisionist theories. Seurat interpreted theories of Charles Henry on the psychological effects of line and color as well as those of the laws of optical blending of color formulated by Chevreul and Rood.
Reading: Paul Signac, "D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme," 1898.
23. Site Visit: Musée Gustave Moreau: Gustave Moreau, Jupiter et Sémélé, 1895
For Moreau, as for Vinci and Poussin with whom he liked to compare himself, painting is mental. It does not try to recreate on the canvas the spectacle of nature; it first addresses the spirit and comes from deep within the artist.
IX. The Historical Avant-Gardes
24. Mini-test 4
History of the perspective of the Renaissance to Cézanne and Picasso
Picasso, Les demoiselle d’Avignon, 1907, MOMA, New York
25. Musée d’Art Moderne of the City of Paris: fauvism and cubism
Reading: Apollinaire, “Les cubistes,” 1911; Apollinaire, “Du sujet de la peinture moderne,” 1912; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, L’apparition du cubisme, 1920
26. Final exam
(included in course reader)
Apollinaire, “Du sujet de la peinture moderne,” Les soirées de Paris. 1912.
Apollinaire, “Les cubistes,” L’Intransigeant. Paris, October 10, 1911.
Baudelaire, Charles. “Qu’est-ce qu’est le romantisme,” Curiosités esthétiques, le salon de 1845, texts by Henri Lemaître, les Classiques Garnier, Paris.
Cousin, Victor. “Poussin, peintre de la pensée,” Du vrai, du beau et du bien. Edition including an appendix on French art by Victor Cousin. Paris: Didier, 1854.
De Goncourt, Jules and Edmond. “Le grand poète du XVIIIe siècle est Watteau,” in L'art du XVIIIe siècle,
1860.
Delacroix, “Couleur,” in Dictionnaire des beaux-arts. Paris: Ed. Hermann, 1996.
Duret, Théodore. Histoire des peintres impressionnistes. Paris: Floury, 1939.
Honour, Hugh. Le Néo-classicisme. Paris: Hachette Livre, Livre de poche, 1998.
Ingres. “Du dessin” and “De la couleur, du ton et de l’effet,” Ecrits sur l’art. Paris: La Bibliothèque des
Arts, Paris, 1994.
Jamot, Paul. "Corot, Rousseau et le paysage en France vers 1830," Revue de Paris, Year 30, Vol. 1, February 1, 1923.
Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry. L’apparition du cubisme. Munich, 1920.
Signac, Paul. "D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme," La Revue blanche, Vol. 16, Paris, 1898.
Various authors on the Salon des Refusés (1863 texts) and on Manet’s l’Olympia (1865 texts).