Gary Tinterow

A glorious work to dip in and out of, with myriads of pictures and drawings and wondrous biographies of the people Ingres painted. It's amusing to read the biographies but the paintings tell the same story. Ingres tells you most of what you need to know! in his wonderful portraits.
I went to the London exhibition in 1999 and couldn't afford this catalogue at the time but found my copy in a charity shop yesterday. Such serendipity.
If you do not know the story of how Ingres and his wife met I show more beg you to research this. :-) And they say internet dating is fraught. Ingres and his first wife became engaged sight unseen!
I do recall a simply wonderful sketch of Madeleine, his wife, at the London exhibition which was the most astonishingly lively and loving portrait I have ever seen. Sadly I cannot find a reproduction of this in the book but it is a mighty tome and I shall keep looking. show less

This slim volume examines the creation of the Met's then-new 19th century European paintings & sculpture galleries in the early 1990s. Using Beaux-Arts detailing, the museum created 21 interconnected rooms to house some of the most popular works from the 19th century.

The galleries in question are no longer new. In fact, they're in the process of being redone yet again. But in 1993, they were shiny and new and perhaps the talk of the museum world.

I wasn't excited by the art and the write ups didn't really make me look at the paintings. I didn't know anything about COROT before. Apparently this exhibition was at the nag.

Exhibition at the the Musee d'Orsay, Spring/Summer 1994 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fall 1994.

The following are excerpts from a review written by me in October 1994:

"A joint effort between the Metropolitan in New York and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, with loans from museums around the world, the blockbuster exhibit brings together almost two hundred works, many for the first time. The exhibit follows the Impressionists in somewhat chronological order through the decade of the 1860s. show more There are eleven rooms in the exhibit, each devoted to themes that the Impressionists worked on, such as "History Painting", "Still Life", "the Nude", "Portraiture", "the Realist Landscape", "the Modern Landscape". The exhibit provides a basic introduction to these artists and their early influences and it shows how the Impressionists tried to develop a new style of painting while staying within traditional genres.

"One of the highlights of the exhibition is the reunion of such works as the four paintings of la Grenouillère -- works that haven't been seen together since they were painted ... For the first time, we can see Monet's three views of Paris that he painted from the balcony of the Louvre in 1867. There is also a group of paintings by Renoir, Bazille and Sisely that are together again. The three shared a studio in 1867, and Renoir painted a portrait of Bazille at his easel as he and Sisely were working on still lives of the Heron, which are also in the exhibit." show less