Main Building
First Floor
| France 1700-1800 - Section 33 (24)
between 1700 and 1800
Nowhere in 18th-century Europe was painting more sophisticated, technically accomplished and innovative than in Paris. Knowledgeable patrons, thorough artistic training and, from the 1730s, the opportunities for regular public exhibitions all contributed to this.
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| Academicians and landscape Painters - Section 41 (24)
In the first half of the 19th century, the academic teachings of the official art school in Paris, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, dominated French painting. The Academy's rigorous training involved a prolonged period of drawing, first from plaster cast of statues and afterwards from life models.
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| Manet, Monet and the Impressionists - Section 43 (23)
Impressionism
Edouard Manet was an innovative painter who, from the 1860s, began producing paintings with simplified forms, bold, flat touches of color and subjects drawn from life. These radical works provoked violent criticism and some were rejected by the Paris Salon, the official French art exhibition.
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| Seurat and Pissarro - Section 44 (18)
Georges Seurat was one of the most audacious and innovative artist of the 1880s. His large painting of 1884, 'Bathers at Asnières', dominates this room. Working lads, on a day off, relax on the banks of the Seine in an industrial suburb to the west of Paris. Seurat invests the plebeian subject with a grandeur and solemnity reminiscent of ancient Egyptian art.
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| Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh - Section 45 (20)
Post-Impressionnistes
The final decades of the 19th century were a time of great upheaval in French art. The ferment was not always centered on the art capital of Paris. Paul Cézanne left the city in the 1880s, creating some of his most audacious late works, such as the monumental “Bathers”, in the relative obscurity of his native Aix-en-Provence.
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