October 10, 2013 – December 8, 2013
Organized by the Norton Museum of Art
The exhibition will focus on the recent gift of The Fishermen (1746), a spectacularly beautiful painting of an idyllic Roman campagna scene by Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), the leading 18th-century French painter in Rome. One of eight canvases specially commissioned in 1746 by the Marquis Pierre Charles de Villette, it is one of only two known to have survived to modern times. Key explanatory texts and detailed images will allow visitors to follow its progress from authentication through conservation. A discussion of Vernet, Roman 18th-century painting, and the phenomenon called “The Grand Tour” will give visitors the opportunity to place The Fishermen in the broader context of European landscape painting. Artworks from the same period by French, Italian, and Flemish artists such as Giovanni Paolo Panini, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, Jan Frans van Bloeman and Jean-Baptiste Lallemand will put The Fisherman in context.