French Art from Louis XVI to Louis XVIII from the Horvitz Collection

The 125 drawings and 20 paintings in this exhibition reveal the ways that more than 70 artists engaged with artistic debates, archaeological discoveries, and sweeping political changes from the final decades of the ancien régime through the French Revolution, Empire, and Restoration. The show explores the visual shifts in taste, which moved away from the popular and decorative mid-18th-century Rococo style toward a more structured and formal Neoclassical and, in the early 19th century, Romanticism.

Image: Joseph-Marie Vien (French, 1715–1809), Love Giving the Prize, 1794. Pen with black ink and brush with brown wash on off-white laid paper, framing lines in black ink, laid down on a decorated mount. The Horvitz Collection, Wilmington.