Drawn from one of the world's finest private collections, "French Oil Sketches and the Academic Tradition" will display works by artists such as François Boucher, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Laurent de La Hyre, Jean-Baptiste Leprince, Jean-Louis Ernst Messionier, Ary Scheffer and Simon Vouet. The 127 works range thematically from religious, mythological, historical and genre paintings to costume studies, landscape and portraiture. The exhibition opens Sept. 30 and will run through Dec. 3.
The oil sketch was used by artists of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as a crucial step in painting. Executed on canvas or panel, and usually on a relatively small scale, the sketch served as a record of first thoughts and subsequent compositional ideas, a model for a finished work or a presentation piece for a patron. The nature of these sketches-the visible brush strokes, the lack of confining outlines and the broken areas of paint -- reveals the artist's style and vision, and a spontaneity that the French academic tradition deemed inappropriate for finished paintings. The oil sketch was a part of every student's formal training by the Academie Royale.
The Academie, later called the École des Beaux-Arts, governed artistic standards and determined the careers of many young painters. The finest students went on to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, establishing their careers as professional painters, professors and even directors of Academie.
By 1900, the tradition of the oil sketch became less popular, and its distinction from the finished painting had lost meaning. The advent of the modern era ushered in new attitudes toward formal painting practices in the form of Impressionism. In an attempt to capture the spontaneity lost between the sketch and finished painting, many artists skipped the oil sketch and began painting directly onto canvas. -Anna Lalos