This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery. Please follow the links below for related online resources or visit our current exhibitions schedule.

Related Resources Exhibition Overview Exhibition Feature Works by Antoine Watteau in the Gallery's Collection Works by Jean Siméon Chardin in the Gallery's Collection Works by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in the Gallery's Collection Lecture Abstracts View Related Collection Tours The Rococo and Watteau Chardin and Portraiture Boucher and Fragonard Press Materials

This installation of approximately 106 key paintings spanning the entire 18th century constitutes the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to genre painting--scenes from daily life, real and imagined--in French art of the Old Regime. The exhibition charts the development and transformations of an art that formed a constantly changing mirror of Parisian social life and culture. The exhibition includes Antoine Watteau's fêtes galantes; Boucher's lyrical pastorals; Jean Siméon Chardin's dignified representations of bourgeois life; Jean-Baptiste Greuze's more sentimental dramas; Jean-Honoré Fragonard's dangerous liaisons; and Louis-Léopold Boilly's polished interiors and Paris street scenes at the end of the century. The exhibition complements Colorful Impressions: The Printmaking Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France.