Room 332. In the Portrait of Josephine (Napoleon’s first wife) Francois Gerard (1770-1837) presents a new type of formal portrait, in which he skillfully combines the austerity of a classical composition with a simple and unaffected rendering of the appearance of his model. One of the first artists to portray the everyday life of the bourgeois society of his time was Louis Boilly, who painted the small picture A Game of Billiards.
Jean-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), a staunch adherent of Classicism and an ardent admirer of antiquity and Raphael, was among the most subtle and complex artists of the mid-nineteenth century. The only painting by him in the Hermitage is the portrait of the Russian diplomat Count Guryev, painted in 1821 and notable for the austere formal arrangement and the strength and assurance of line.
Room 329. Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), the major painter of the Romantic movement, is represented in the Hermitage by two late works. Lion Hunt in Morocco (1854) and Arab Saddling His Horse (1855). One glance at these paintings is sufficient for an understanding of the great difference between them and the paintings produced by the artists of the Classical school. Painted in bright, fresh colours, Delacroix’s canvases are filled with the ardent breath of life, an a sense of the grandeur of nature.
One of the representatives of the Romantic movement in sculpture is the animalist Antoine Barye (1796-1875), the creator of the bronze groups A Lion and a Snake and A Panther and an Antelope. Barye imbues his works with great expressiveness, revealing in them the harsh laws of the animal kingdom.
Room 328, 325, 324 and 322. In the 1830s a realist trend appeared in French painting, heralded by the Barbizon school of landscape painters. This name was given to a group of artists who had settled in the village of Barbizon near Paris, where they faithfully reproduced in their paintings their native countryside. There is a large collection of landscapes of the Barbizon school in the Hermitage. Its leading figure, Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867), showed, even in one of his early works, View in the Vicinity of Granville, that the simple, visually unprepossessing
Countryside of Normandy could become a source of inspiration. Close to Rousseau in their perception of nature are Jules Dupre, Charles Francois Daubigny, Diaz de la Pena, Charles Jacque and Constant Troyon.
Room 321. An important place in the history of French landscape painting belongs to Camille Corot (1796-1875). A profound, subtle understanding of nature connected him with the Barbizon painters, but unlike them Corot did not strive for an accurate reproduction of landscape. His poetic landscapes are echoes of the artist’s own experiences. “If you are really moved,” said Corot, “the sincerity of your feelings will be felt by others.”
The work of the leading painters of the realist movement , Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) and Gustav Courbert (1819-1877), developed in the 1850s and ‘60s. Millet was the first among his contemporaries to depict French village life, with what was then unusual degree of profundity and veracity. The Hermitage possesses only one of his paintings, Peasant Women Carrying Firewood.
Courbert, an active figure in the Paris Commune, was the major representative of the realist movement in painting and ardently defended the right of the artist to portray contemporary life. The only Courbert in the Hermitage is the Landscape with a Dead Horse which, because of its poor state of preservation, does not give us any real idea of his skill as an artist. The choice of theme in this painting represents a challenge to the “official” art, because Courbert maintains here that the artist should be concerned with life in all its diversity.
Room 320. Towards the 1870s Impressionism reached its peak in France, the movement having originated as a protest against the rigid convention which prevailed in official art. The Impressionists emerged as heirs to the realist traditions and enriched painting with their fresh, joyful colours, their representation of light, and exquisite rendering of atmosphere. They drew only from life capturing the spontaneity and naturalness of the first visual impression. In conveying the wealth of colour in the real around them Impressionists attempted to catch and to record its face, forever changing under the play of light.
Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) embodies the principles and methods of Impressionism in portrait painting. Renoir did not attempt to reveal in his portraits intricate feelings or emotions; he caught the spontaneous movement, the half-smile, the gentle reverie of his model. Unaffected animation and simplicity characterize his Girl with a Fan and Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary. Renoir’s colours are notable for their freshness, the richness of hues, and the extremely delicate transition from one tone to the next.
The work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is represented by some pastels-Woman Combing Her Hair, After the Bath, Dancers and Woman at Her Toilet.
Room 319. One of the leading Impressionist painters was Claude Monet (1840-1926), whose picture Impression: Sunrise, exhibited in Paris in 1874, gave the name to the whole movement. An early work of his, Lady in the Garden (1867), reflects the first success of the new manner of painting. Abandoning black and subdued tones, Monet painted the shade in color depending on the surrounding milieu. The woman’s white dress in the shade of the parasol, for example, acquires a bluish hue against the background of the green foliage and the blue sky. In the landscape Pond at Montgeron (1876-77) the countryside is filled with the subtle, barely perceptible movement of currents of moist air, in which the outlines of things melt into nothing. Gradually the rendering of light and air becomes Monet’s main them and he portrays one and the same subject several time in different lights, stripping things of their of their materiality.
Room 318. Paris street life with its characteristic bustle, commotion and endless flow of traffic and pedestrians was captured by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) in his paintings The Boulevard Montmartre in Paris and La Place du Theatre-Francais in Paris.
The eleven paintings by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)make it possible to observe the main stages in the development of the artist’s work. Unlike the Impressionists Cezanne tried to reveal the materiality and plasticity of whaterver he deplicted. Typical in this way is the landscape Banks of the Marne (1888), in which he painted a tranquil scene from nature, as through trying to immortalize on canvas her immutable qualities. Still-life painting was Cezanne’s favourite genre. His still lifes are simple: a wooden table, two or three faience vessels, some fruit, all these objects possessing some special distinctive corporeity peculiar to Cezanne. To preserve their “eternal” qualities-weight and volume-Cezanne made the form geometric, building it up with thick strokes of bright green, orange and blue.
Rooms 317 and 316 contain examples of the work of the Post-Impressionist painters Van Gogh and Gauguin.
Room 317. The Hermitage has four paintings by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890): View of the Arles, Ladies of Arles (Memory of the Garden at Etten), Bushes, and Cottages with Thached Roofs, painted during the last years of the artist’s life. Cottages with Thatched Roofs (1890) is imbued with the feeling of anxiety which overcame him on seeing the poor dwellings, clinging to the slope of the hill. Van Gogh’s characteristic dramatic tension is felt in the vividness of the colours, the restless rhythm of the thick, energetic brush-strokes, and the expressiveness of line.
Displayed in the same room are Tropical Forest, The Chopin Memorial in the Luxemburg Gardens and View to the Left of the Gate of Vanves by Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), usually referred to as a Primitive.
Room 316. The fifteen paintings in the Hermitage by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) belong to his so-called Tahiyian period. In his pictures painted in the tropics Gauguin extols a world untouched by “civilization” and full of the exotic, where people live in harmony with nature. Gauguin’s paintings are decorative, the areas of local colours lie on the canvas in motionless patches, and the contours of the figures and objects-sometimes smooth and fluid, sometimes exquisitely delicate-give the picture the semblance of a coloured pattern (Tahitian Pastorals, Woman Holding a Fruit, Miraculous Source, The Idol, etc.)
Room 343-345. The thirty-seven pictures by Henry Matisse (1869-1954), painted between 1900 and 1913 , make it possible to illustrate the special features of the work of one of the leading twentieth century French artists. The Family Group, Red Room and other of Matisse’s works are striking in their decorative quality and their saturated colours. Rejecting a chiaroscuro treatment, Matisse simplifies and schematizes his figures and objects, building up his composition on the contrasting juxtaposition of large areas of pure colour. The radiant colourfulness of Matisse’s canvases produces a feeling of joy and gaiety.
Room 346 and 347. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was an eminent French progressive, the winner of the International Peace Prize and of the International Lenin Prize “for the Strengthening of Peace between Nations”. The development of Picasso as an artist was unusually complex and contradictory. The Hermitage collection, consisting of thirty-seven works, helps illustrate the early stages of this development. In one of the best paintings of his early period, Woman Drinking Absinth (1901), Picasso created a type that evokes a deep sense of tragedy. The Portrait of Soler and The Visit (Two Sisters) belong to the so-called Blue Period (1901-1904); his Pink Period (1905-1906) is represented by a gouache drawing, Boy with a Dog.
Between 1906 and 1907 Picasso was absorbed with analysis of form and reduced everything to a simplified volume similar to a cube, a sphere or a cylinder. He became one of the founder of a new tendency in art, Cubism, typical of which are such works as Woman with a Fan, Three Women, Pitcher and Bowl and others. After this Picasso arrived at a complete break-up of form; he destroyed volume and created free compositions from planes and lines.
Rooms 348 and 349. Among the paintings of early twentieth century artist are works by Andre Derain (1880-1954) – The Grove, The Lake and Harbour in Provence; Maurice Vlaminck (1876-1958) – A View of the Seine; Jean-Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) – A Room and Children; Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) – Early Spring and A Corner of Paris; Louis Valtat (1869-1952) – Pleasure Party in the Garden; Maurice Denis (1870-1943) – Spring Landscape with Figures.
Room 350 contains a large collection of pictures by the fine landscape painter Albert Marquet (1875-1947),whose greatest love was Paris and who painted her streets and squares, quays and bridges over the Seine. The colours in his landscapes are always true to life and objects are represented in a very generalized way.
Displayed in the same room are landscapes Leopold Survage (1879-1968) and Andre Fougeron (born 1913). The Bridge was painted by the latter in 1964. Glowing colours and great vitality distinguish the Red Dancer and Lady in a Black Hat by Cornelius Kees Van Dongen (1877-1968).
In room 350 are also shown paintings by Fernand Leger (1881-1955), - Carte postale and Composition.
The Hermitage exhibition of French art also includes marble sculptures by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and bronzes by Aristide Maillol (1861-1944)