Every once in a while, an exhibition comes along that reminds one of the truly operatic passions that motivated the men and women who assembled Baltimore's great art collections. The stunning collaborative exhibition of French works on paper that opens today at both the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art is just such an event.
Titled The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas, the show presents about 150 French drawings, prints and watercolors divided nearly evenly between the Walters and the BMA (the show's curators have construed the term "drawings" broadly enough to include works on paper in all media). The works on view represent just a sampling of the approximately 900 French works on paper owned by the two museums.
Among them are works by famous masters like Honore Daumier, whose scathing satirical portraits like The Amateurs and The Good Friends made him France's most famous caricaturist; Mary Cassatt, the American impressionist (she's represented by one of her characteristic portraits of women); her friend Edgar Degas, whose crayon study Ballet Dancer Standing is one of the loveliest works in the show.
Alongside big names like Eugene Delacroix, Theodore Gericault and Jean-Leon Gerome there are also dozens of lesser-known but no less expressive French masters such as Eugene Deshayes, Pierre-Edouard Frere and the delightful 19th-century genre painter Leon Bonvin.
Bonvin (1817-1887), a village tavern waiter and part-time painter whose realistically detailed landscapes, still lifes and genre scenes were overshadowed even in his own day by those of his more successful brother, Francois, was a particular favorite of Baltimore's William Walters, who became the artist's most important patron.
Bonvin's Cook With Red Apron (1862), for example, is a charming scene depicting a woman in a voluminous vermilion garment chopping a large cabbage on a table strewn with garden vegetables.
This watercolor was one of the first French works on paper that Walters acquired after the death of his wife, Ellen, in 1862, while the family was living in France, and it is probable that it and similar genre pictures represented for Walters a remembrance of lost domestic happiness.
Walters was also an avid horticulturist, and many of the Bonvin works he acquired are flower or plant studies rendered in meticulously realistic detail. (In all, Walters amassed more than 50 works by Bonvin, which, like the drawings of other artists he collected, were carefully assembled in bound leather volumes.)
