Exhibition by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon: Fragments of a Love Speech

On the occasion of the bicentenary of the death of the painter and engraver Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, the Baron-Martin Museum is organising a retrospective exhibition of this artist, whose presence is important in the collections:

Rebellious, vulnerable and endearing, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1858-1823) never gave up on his dreams and shook up academic art with a quiet obstinacy, as it was envisaged by his contemporaries and especially by Louis David, a fierce supporter of an art devoid of sensuality and anchored to the grandeur of Roman virtues. His singular position and his plastic strength make him a ferryman, an essential milestone between the art of the Ancien Régime and the Romanticism of the 19th century, reflecting an era while going beyond it.
His tender and fragile vein, associated with a caressing and insinuating charm, reinvents with a delicious fantasy the card of the tender and a delightful game around love and idle pleasures. He was also a talented portraitist, to the point that some of his works, such as the portraits of Georges Anthony, postmaster at Gray, and that of his wife, that of Nicolas Perchet or that of the empress Josephine in the park of Malmaison remain pieces of anthology. If he is the painter of the colour of feelings, he was in tune with his time, which was disrupted by the violence of the Revolution, and was able to give synthetic representations of his time in the form of allegories visualising the ideas and concepts of the day. Landscape is a discreet presence in his work, but it projects his feelings onto a nature that is trusting and welcoming to the emotions of people.
If Prud'hon's personal life was marked by deprivation and material difficulties of all kinds and an absence of happy love, his work can be read as a timeless adventure that bears a specific way of expressing life and its great attachments, and of understanding them.
Prud'hon has ties with Gray, where he stayed between 1795 and 1796. There he painted in pastels a number of bourgeois or recently ennobled families with a social status in transition. At that time master of his talent and free from the constraints of Paris, Prud'hon focused on the inner flow of individualities inhabited by a radiant or aggressive vitality, a romantic fabric, a prudent reserve or a childlike ingenuity.
His heart was in a state of flux, torn between love and candour, and he was constantly searching for new intensities. In a way, he was always in search of the feminine of his masculine, finding in his artistic expression the modern expression of eternal subjects. An exceptional presentation of hundreds of works by a terribly endearing artist so close to us on the occasion of the bicentenary of his death!

A must-see!