Events

The Musée des Beaux Arts in Reims owns one of the largest collections of French 19th century landscape paintings, forty-five of which will be displayed in this exhibition. Towards Impressionism, an exhibition curated and managed by Art Centre Basel in collaboration with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims and the City of Reims, France, marks the first time that an exhibition drawn exclusively from the Reims Museum will travel to the United States; the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Winter Park, FL, is one of only two venues nationwide to host this extraordinary collection. The exhibition traces the revolutionary evolution of landscape painting in France from the romantics to the School of Barbizon, the circle of Honfleur, and up to Impressionism.

Towards Impressionism traces the development of French landscape painting from the schools of Barbizon and Honfleur up to Impressionism, featuring over forty works from the extraordinary collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims. Selections from the Frye Art Museum’s own holdings will be incorporated into the show, making this a unique opportunity to situate masterpieces from the collection within their original context. The Reims museum has one of the world’s foremost collections of landscape paintings by artists associated with the Barbizon colony—artists like Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, and Constant Troyon who gathered in the village of Barbizon between 1830 and 1855 to paint in and around the nearby Forest of Fontainebleau. Fascinated by the mysteries of the forest and rural tradition, the Barbizon artists rejected urban life and the teachings of the French Academy. Where previously landscape had served only as backdrop for allegorical or historical tableaux, the Barbizonists painted landscape for its own sake, working from observation but often infusing their subjects with an emotionality reminiscent of Romanticism.