French Paintings and Painters*

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Voltaire wrote that French painting began with Nicolas Poussin, a 17th-century baroque painter who frequently set scenes from classical mythology and the Bible in ordered landscapes bathed in golden light.

In the 18th century Jean-Baptiste Chardin chose as a subject the humbler domesticity. In 1785 the public reacted with enthusiasm to two large paintings with clear republican messages: The Oath of the Horatii and Brutus Condemning His Son by Jacques Louis David. David became one of the leaders of the French Revolution, and a virtual dictator in matters of art. He was made official painter by Napoleon, glorifying him as a general, first consul and then emperor, and his best remembered for his painting of Marat lying dead in his bath.

Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, David's most gifted pupil in Paris, continued in the neoclassical tradition. The historical pictures to which he devoted most of his life (Oedipus and the Sphinx) are now generally regarded as inferior to his portraits.

The gripping Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault is on the threshold of romanticism; if Géricault had not died at a young age - he was 33 - he would probably have become a leader of the movement, along with his friend Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix's most famous picture, perhaps, is Liberty Leading the People, which commemorates the July Revolution of 1830.

The members of the Barbizon School brought about a parallel transformation of landscape painting. The school derived its name from a village near the Foret de Fontainbleau, where Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet, among others, gathered to paint in the open air. Corot is best known for his landscapes, Millet took many of his subjects from peasant life (The Glaners) and had a great influence on Van Gogh.

Millet anticipated the realist programme of Gustav Courbet, a prominent member of the Paris Commune, whose paintings show the drudgery of manual labour and dignity of ordinary life (Funeral at Ornans, The Angelus).

Edouard Manet used realism to depict the life of the Parisian middle classes, yet he included in his pictures numerous references to the old masters. Both his Dejeuner sur l'Herbe and Olympia were considered scandalous, largely because they broke with the traditional treatment of their subject matter.

Impressionism, initially a term of derision, was taken from the title of an 1874 experimental painting by Claude Monet, Impression: Soleil Levant (Impression: Sunrise). Monet was the leading figure in the school, which counted among its members Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The impressionists' main aim was to capture the effects of fleeting light, painting almost universally en plein air, and light came to dominate the content of their painting.

Edgar Degas was a fellow traveller, but he favoured his studio to the open air, preferring to paint the racecourse (At the Races) and in ballet studios (The Dance Class). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a great admire of Degas, but chose subject one or two notches below: people in bistros, brothels and music halls of Montmartre (eg Au Loulin Rouge).

Paul Cezanne is celebrated for his still-lifes and landscape depicting the south of France, though he spent many years in Paris after breaking with the impressionists. The name of Paul Gauguin immediately conjures up to his studies of Tahitian and Breton women. Both painters are usually referred to as postimpressionists, something of a catch-all term for the diverse styles that flowed from impressionism.

In the late 19th-century Gauguin worked for a time in Arles in Provence with the Dutch-born Van Gogh, who spent most of his painting life in France.

A brilliant, innovative artist, Van Gogh produced haunting self-portraits and landscapes in which color assumes an expressive and emotive quality. His later technique paralleled pointillism, developed by Georges Seurat, who applied paint in small dots or brussh strokes of unmixed color, producing fine mosaics of warm and cool tones. Henri Rousseau was a contemporary of the postimpressionists but his 'naive' art was totally unaffected by them. His dream-like pictures of the Paris suburbs and of jungle and desert scenes have had a lasting influence on 20th-century art.

Gustav Moreau was a member of the symbolist school. His eerie treatment of mythological subjects can be seen in his old studio, which is now the Musée Gustave Moreau in the 9e. Fauvism took its name from the slur of a critic who compared the exhibitors at the 1905 Salon d'Automne (Autumn Salon) with fauves (beasts) because their radical use of intensely bright colors. Among these 'beastly' painters were Henri matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck.

Cubism was effectively launched in 1907 by the Spanish prodigy Pablo Picasso with his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Cubism, as developed by Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris, deconstructed the subject into a system of intersecting planes and presentes various aspects simultaneously.

In the late 1920s and 1930s the Ecole de Paris (School of Paris) was formed by a group of impressionists, mostly foreign born, including Amadeo Modigliani from Italy, the Japanese Foujita and the Russian Marc Chagall, whose works combine fantasy and folklore.

Dada, both a literary and artistic movement of revolt, started in Zurich in 1915. In Paris, one of the key Dadaists was Marcel Duchamp, whose Mona Lisa adorned with moustache and goatee epitomises the spirit of the movement. Surrealism, and offshoot of dada, flourished between the wars. Drawing on the theories of Freud, it attempted to reunite the conscious and unconscious realms, to permeate everyday life with fantasies and dreams. Among the most important proponents of this style in Paris were Chagall, as well as René Magritte, André Breton and Piet Mondrian. The most influancial, hoever, was the Spanish-born artist Salvator Dali, who arrived in the French Capital in 1929 and painted some of his most seminal works (eg Sleep, Paranoia) while residing here.

WWII ended Paris' role as the world's artistic capital. Many artists left France, and though some returned after the war, the city never regained its old magnetism, with New York and the London picking up the baton. A few postwar Parisian artists are noteworthy, however, including Nicolas de Staël, Jean Fautrier and Bernard Buffet.

Top 5 Art Museums:

- Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

- Musée du Louvre

- Musée Gustave Moreau

- Musée d'Orsay

- Musée Rodin

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