French Drawings and Photographs from the Karen B. Cohen Gift, at the Morgan Library & Museum

Into the Woods: French Drawings and Photographs from the Karen B. Cohen Gift, at our partner institution, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, brings together objects from Cohen’s generous gift to the museum with related examples from the Morgan’s collection. The selection of over fifty works on paper by French nineteenth-century artists explores new approaches to the rural landscape and its inhabitants and helps to define the role artists played in defining a modern relationship to nature.

Steeped in the pictorial tradition of their predecessors, French artists reinvigorated the genre with their commitment to naturalism. They discovered new effects through the use of a wide range of media, from charcoal to photography. A focus on rural laborers, and women in particular, led to some of the first empathetic—and least romanticized—depictions of the rural working class.  Artists featured include Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles François Daubigny, Théodore Géricault, and Théodore Rousseau, among other masters. The exhibition will be on view until October 22.

(Image: Paul Huet, Study for Forest of Fontainebleau: Hunters, black chalk, brown and gray wash, opaque lead white watercolor on blue wove paper, altered to green-blue, the Morgan Library & Museum, New York)