French Nineteenth-Century Drawings and Watercolors at the Brooklyn Museum

In 1900 the more than five hundred gouaches and ink drawings made by James Jacques Joseph Tissot for his Life of Christ were purchased by public subscription by The Brooklyn Museum, and in 1992 a sketchbook by Tissot, related to this series, was also purchased for the collection. Over the intervening years nearly one hundred other works on paper by nineteenth-century French artists entered the collection. Many of them are by artists now considered to be the major masters of their time; but there are also works by other artists, both academic and avant-garde, less familiar to the American public today, who deserve recognition. This collection - which spans a century of creativity and a subsequent century of collecting, thus preserving a portion of our cultural and artistic heritage - is one of the significant holdings of works on paper at this great museum.
This volume is part of an ongoing series devoted to the Museum's outstanding and encyclopedic collection of works on paper. It presents ninety-three drawings, watercolors, and pastels by some fifty artists, ranging from Fragonard through Corot, Millet, Daumier, and Rodin; the Impressionists Degas, Manet, Morisot, and Pissarro; the Post-Impressionists Cezanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh; and the modernist pioneers Picasso and Gris.
Through an examination of these works and the fascinating texts that accompany them, we can gain an understanding not only of the aesthetic attitudes of each artist and his society, but also of the history, politics, and social mores of the time and place in which each work was created. These works on paper, thanks to their intimacy and directness not found in the more formal media of oil painting and sculpture, help us to understand better the art and the artist's thoughts at the moment of creation.