Ger Luijten

Mary Morton

In the eighteenth century the tradition of open-air painting was based in Italy, Rome in particular. Artists came from all over Europe to study classical sculpture and architecture, as well as masterpieces of Renaissance and Baroque art. During their studies, groups of young painters visited the Italian countryside, training their eyes and their hands to transcribe the effects of light on a range of natural features. The practice became an essential aspect of art education, and spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. This exhibition focuses on the artists? wish to convey the immediacy of nature observed at first hand.0Around a hundred works, most of them unfamiliar to the general public, will be displayed. The artists represented include Thomas Jones, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Achille-Etna Michallon, Camille Corot, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Johan Thomas Lundbye, Vilhelm Kyhn, Carl Blechen, Johann Martin von Rohden, Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Johann Jakob Frey, among others. The sketches demonstrate the skill and ingenuity with which each artist quickly translated these first-hand observations of atmospheric and topographical effects while the impression was still fresh. 0The exhibition and the catalogue will be organized thematically, reviewing, as contemporary artists did, motifs as trees, rocks, water, volcanoes, and sky effects, and favourite topgraphical locations, such as Rome and Capri. The catalogue will present numerous unpublished plein air sketches, and contains much original scholarship on this relatively young field of art history.00Exhibition: National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA (02.02.-03.05.2020) / The Fondation Custodia, Paris, France (14.06-13.09.2020) / Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK (04.10-31.01.2021).

Open-Air Painting in Europe 1780-1870

True to Nature

In the 1720s and 1730s, Jean-Baptiste Oudry established himself as the preeminent painter in France of hunts, animals, still lifes, and landscapes. Oudry’s Painted Menagerie focuses on a suite of eleven life-size portraits of exotic animals from the royal menagerie at Versailles, painted by Oudry between 1739 and 1752. These paintings eventually found their way into the ducal collection in Schwerin, Germany. Among them is the magnificent portrait of Clara, an Indian rhinoceros who became a celebrity in mid-eighteenth-century Europe. Her portrait has been out of public view for more than a century, and it is presented here in its newly conserved state.

Mary Morton

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