This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.
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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.