The Met: European Paintings To 1800, Part The Third

And now, the exciting conclusion of our multi-day tour of the Met's European paintings to 1800...and somewhat beyond...

Georges de La Tour, The Penitent Magdalen, 1640

A very early Velazquez, The Supper at Emmaus, 1622

Velazquez, Portrait of a Man, 1635; perhaps a study
for a larger painting...

Velazquez, signed copy of a portrait of Philip IV, 1624

Velazquez, Portrait of Juan de Pareja, 1650; Pareja was 
Velzquez' personal slave, whom he subsequently freed and who
went on to be a successful Madrid artist

Giovanni Panini, Modern Rome, 1757

Watteau, Mezzetin, 1718; Mezzetin is a character from the
Italian commedia dell'arte, same as the more famous Pierrot

Jean Chardin, Soap Bubbles, 1733; several copies elsewhere;
this one destined for the Fuhrermuseum; until 1945

A whole wall of atypically fanciful Hubert Robert landscapes...originally
hung in a royal pleasure palace outside Paris...maybe accounting in part
for his being sentenced to the guillotine some years later...it's a long story,
but he later became one of the first directors of the Louvre as we know it
today...

Joseph Duplessis, Benjamin Franklin, 1778; when he
was representing the rebel colonies and charming the
ladies of Paris   

Fragonard, Marie Emilie Coignet de Courson, with a
Dog, 1769

Corner of a Fragonard and Watteau room

Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, Alexandre Charles 
Emmanuel de Crussol-Florensac, 1787; family favorite
after seeing so many of her portraits at the Louvre, 
Versailles, and the National Gallery (London)

Also by Vigee Le Brun, Julie Le Brun, her daughter; the
Met intimates it has deeper aesthetic/philosophical implications;
looks pretty clumsy to me, but she clearly had a satire/parody
streak...in addition to being Marie Antoinette's portraitist and
having had the good sense to get out of Dodge before the
shooting began...

The lone Hogarth, The Wedding of Stephen Beckinham
and Mary Cox, 1729; great satirist, moralist, not much
of a portraitist

Jean-Baptist Greuze, Broken Eggs, 1756; following in the footsteps
of Steen...

Jacques Louis David, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and
Marie Anne Lavoisier, 1788; Lavoisier was thought
to have revolutionary inclinations, and this painting
was refused admission to the salon of 1787 for being
potentially inflammatory; Lavoisier, the great scientist,
was subsequently guillotined...

Vigee Le Brun, again, Madame Grand, 1783; eventually Talleyrand's
spouse

David, General Etienne-Maurice Gerard, 1816; after major
involvement in the Revolution and in the Napoleonic era,
David retired to Brussels in 1815 to do portraits...

 

Baron Francois Gerard, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
Perigord, 1808

David, The Death of Socrates, 1787; I can't believe the French let
this one go...classic neo-classical David, just before Brutus and the
Lictors...

Louis Leopold Boillly, The Public Viewing of David's "Coronation" 
at the Louvre, 1810; public viewings of David's work were sometimes
as historic as the events they depicted...e.g., The Lictors Bring to
Brutus the Bodies of His Sons...