Feature: THE BIG PICTURE - Exhibition: French drawings to be shown at The Wallace Collection in Manchester Square until 3 January

Published: 30 September, 2010

AN outstanding offering of French drawings, which includes works by Poussin, Boucher, Ingres, Corot, Pissarro and Seurat is currently showing at the Wallace Collection. 

Over the past 30 years the National Gallery of Scotland has carefully and deliberately strengthened its holdings of French drawings to rival its collection of French paintings. This quiet but ongoing acquisitions programme began when many of the artists were considered unfashionable. 

As a result, the National Gallery of Scotland was able to obtain works for what would now be considered bargain prices. Additionally, very few UK national institutions have built a collection of French drawings, making this one all the more significant. 

The subjects covered in the exhibition – which also includes important works by lesser-known masters Jeaurat, Lancrenon, Hesse and Dulac, and artist-writers Eugène Fromentin and George Sand – range from the courtly art of Fontainebleau in the 16th century to the more down-to-earth imagery of the Realists and Impressionists in the 19th century. 

There are preparatory drawings for tapestries and for ambitious Salon pictures, as well as intimate figure studies made in the studio and landscape sketches inspired by study in the open air. Louis Roguin’s striking image, reproduced here, of a pregnant Jewish woman from Algeria wearing an extraordinary metal, cone-shaped headdress is also included. 

Poussin’s exceptional preparatory drawing for one of the greatest paintings in the Wallace Collection, A Dance to the Music of Time, will go on display at the museum for only the second time. 

Two artist-writers feature in the selection – Eugène Fromentin, whose most celebrated text is Les maîtres d’autrefois, and the novelist George Sand, whose extraordinary invented landscape watercolours anticipate the work of Surrealists such as Max Ernst in the 20th century.

The selection for this exhibition, which will later be shown in Edinburgh, has been made so as to relate to paintings on display at the Wallace Collection, hence the choice of A Dance to the Music of Time and also drawings by Claude, Watteau, Scheffer, Decamps and Delaroche – all masters who are particularly associated with the collecting of Lord Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace.

Poussin to Seurat is the third in a series of exhibitions  presented by the Wallace Collection that feature selections from celebrated collections of French drawings. Previous exhibitions in the series are Theatres of Life: Drawings From The Rothschild Collection (2007) and Pomp and Power: French Drawings from Versailles (2006).

• Poussin to Seurat: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Scotland is at the The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1 until January 3. Admission is free. Daily 10am-5pm, 020 7563 9500 www.wallacecollection.org