French Art Prints

About french art prints

France dominated Western painting in the nineteenth century, and Paris — with its annual Salon, its academy, and eventually its independent exhibitions and dealer galleries — was the arena in which that century’s successive movements fought for public attention. The works here trace the arc: the Barbizon painters who took landscape out to the Forest of Fontainebleau; the Realists, led by Gustave Courbet, who after 1848 gave ordinary labor the scale of history painting; the academic tradition they opposed; and the Impressionists, who from their first independent exhibition in 1874 made the fleeting light of boulevards, gardens, and riverbanks their subject.

The Post-Impressionist generation — Cézanne in Provence, Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin in Brittany and Tahiti — pushed French painting toward the twentieth century. Monet’s Stacks of Wheat, painted at Giverny in 1890–91, distill the era’s central discovery: that a single motif, observed under changing conditions, could be inexhaustible.