"Tradition & Revolution in French Art brings together over 100 paintings and drawings of the 18th and 19th centuries from the Musee des Beaux-Arts at Lille, one of the greatest of the French provincial museums." "The catalogue and the exhibition it accompanies demonstrate the diversity and richness of French art of the period and provide an important overview of the major movements and stylistic developments that flourished throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The Neo-Classicism of David, the Romanticism of Delacroix and Gericault, and the Realism of Courbet - aspects of French art that are hardly represented in British public collections - are seen against a background of traditional academic history and religious painting in a survey of the period that, unusually, does not begin or end at 1800 or exaggerate one theme - such as the distinct or novel character of Romantic painting or plein-air landscape." "Conventionally, French art has been discussed in terms of polarities - Romantic art opposed to Neo-Classical, Realism in revolt against the academic, the avant-garde versus the official - but at the time the situation was more complex and more dynamic and, as this book demonstrates, some traditional ideas could themselves be revolutionary and some revolutionary art was in many respects traditional. The introductory essays, which give a clear account in English of a crucial period in the history of French art, discuss history and religious paintings, the major institutions for exhibiting and selling art in France, the educational ideals, and the market which shaped the nature of French painting in those years. And in describing the formation of the superb collection at Lille the book also provides a study of the rise of 19th-century French public collections of contemporary art."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved