Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France

Stein, Perrin, with essays by Charlotte Guichard, Rena M. Hoisington, and Elizabeth M. Rudy (2013)

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Description

The vast holdings of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Drawings and Prints include many acclaimed highlights of the European graphic arts tradition, but also a wealth of lesser-known areas ripe for exploration. With this exhibition and its accompanying publication, Perrin Stein, Curator in the department and a specialist in French Old Master drawings and prints, turns our attention to one such area: etchings made in eighteenth-century France by artists (painters, sculptors, and architects) as well as amateurs, a term used at the time to describe an elite class of art collectors and connoisseurs who believed that artistic practice was an essential component of study, collecting, and criticism.

Table of contents

Director's Foreword
Acknowledgments
Lenders to the Exhibition

Introduction
Perrin Stein

Learning to Etch
Rena M. Hoisington

On the Market: Selling Etchings in Eighteenth-Century France
Elizabeth M. Rudy

Etching as a Vehicle for Innovation: Four Exceptional Peintres-Graveurs
Rena M. Hoisington

Diplomacy, Patronage, and Pedagogy: Etching in the Eternal City
Perrin Stein

Amateurs and the Culture of Etching
Charlotte Guichard

Echoes of Rembrandt and Castiglione: Etching as Appropriation
Perrin Stein

Works in the Exhibition
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Press reviews

Burlington Magazine

“Beautifully produced and designed book…the scholarship is admirable and up-to-date.”

New Republic

“A provocative salute to the intimacy of printmaking as it was practiced in France at the dawn of the modern era...Artists and Amateurs provokes fresh thoughts about the push and pull between formality and playfulness in eighteenth-century French Art—and how the triumph of pictorial play led to the bold experimentalism that Baudelaire would describe a century later.”

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Exhibition

Exhibition_Artists and Amateurs

October 1, 2013–January 5, 2014

Throughout the eighteenth century, a large number of artists—painters, sculptors, draftsmen, and amateurs—experimented with etching, a highly accessible printmaking technique akin to drawing. Some, like Antoine Watteau and François Boucher, encountered the process within the thriving commerce of the Paris print market. Others, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Hubert Robert, experimented with the technique during their student years in Rome. Over the course of the century, the free and improvisational aesthetic of the etching process increasingly was embraced, and French artists looked to seventeenth-century masters, such as Rembrandt in the north, and Salvator Rosa and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione to the south, for inspiration. The expressive potential of the technique was also explored in a more experimental manner by artists like Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and Louis Jean Desprez, who harnessed the inky tonalities of the medium to their personal and idiosyncratic vision. The exhibition will include loans from North American museums and private collections.