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Paris-Louvre-French painting section-Greuze to Corot

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Let’s move on. The Louvre is huge!

Greuze-Broken jar

-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) is to admire in gallery 51. He was surnamed the “Moralisator”, but is very gracious when he paints “The Broken Jar”. In the face of "l'Oiseau mort" you can already see how Renoir will paint 120 years later.
Gallery 60 is an important one. Salle Ingres. French painter, born at Montauban.  After an early academic training in the Toulouse academy he went to Paris in 1796 and was a fellow student of Gros in David's studio. His portraits fall into two categories: portraits of himself and his friends, conceived in a Romantic spirit and portraits of well-to-do clients, which are characterized by purity of line and enamel-like colouring. He greatly worried about every detail.  Here you can see the famous " La Baigneuse " and "Louis-Francois-Bertin” ", symbol of the sitting and triumphant bourgeoisie.

Gericault

Gallery 61 (Salle Gericault): did you notice how many times Gericault uses horses in his paintings? Here on display the lyrical impetuosity, excitement and dramatic intensity in "Officier de chasse a cheval”, a masterpiece! From Horace Vernet (1758-1836] an academic, conservatist and outdated nationalism: " La Barriere de Clichy" Let’s move on, there is better and more innovating to come!

Chopin by Delacroix

The major works of Delacroix are on display in room 62: remember that the oversized, large paintings of Gericault) (Radeau de la Meduse) and Delacroix (“ Femmes d'Alger"," La Liberte “) are on the 1st floor, Denon wing in rooms 75 to 77. Here we see " l'Assassinat de l'Eveque de Liege", the famous "Autoportrait and the universally known portrait of Frederic Chopin.
Next rooms we enter the world of the “Ecole de Barbizon” with Millet and Diaz de la Pena. Main figures of this movement were Georges Michel, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet and Corot. Peasants were no longer décor elements but real actors, like Millet painted it many times. Did you know that " Botteleur de foins " (1850), just a gentle painting scared the hell out of the bourgeois?? They accused Millet of being a revolutionary. A trouble maker! How cracked you can get....
Anyway with this school the proletarian class received a well-deserved description on oil canvas.

Corot-Dame en bleu

And to end, a series of about 100 paintings by the sole Corot (1796-1875). Son of Parisian milliners, Corot first worked as a cloth merchant before, at the age of twenty-six, deciding to become a painter. Corot received official recognition in the 1840s and soon had more landscape commissions than he could handle. But even at his most realistic, Corot never entirely abandoned the lessons of his classical training, and his landscapes are invariably pervaded by an atmosphere of idyllic calm. Here we have "Zingara au tambour Basque", Jeune Fille Grecque a la fontaine, Souvenir de Castelgandolfo "Femme a la Perle", several paintings with a beautiful, slight touch, quivered, vaporous ambiance. A consulted book-guide gave the idea that Corot was maybe influenced by the first photographic clichés, who were mostly blurred? One thing is for sure. He announces Impressionism. 

Bibliography

The Louvre, Seven Faces of a Museum; The Louvre (Collection Guides Gallimard), Jean Francois Millet: His Life and Letters by Julia Mary Cartwright Ady (Published 1971), Drawn into the Light: Jean Francois Millet, by Alexandra R. Murphy (Published 1999), Ingres then and now (Visions: Critical Studies in the History and Theory of Art), by Adrian Rifkin, " Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, by Robert Rosenblum (From Abrams' Masters of Art series), Eugene Delacroix 1798-1863, The Prince of Romanticism, by Gilles Neret,  Delacroix, by Barthelmy Jobert.: the definitive Delacroix monograph, from the world's foremost expert on his art.