Get a sneak preview of the latest hit exhibit from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Devotion to Drawing: The Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix. Page Knox of Columbia University an the Met will talk about Delacroix from 7 to 8 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 20 at Darien Library. Renowned as a giant of French Romantic painting, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was equally a dedicated and an innovative draftsman. Through a selection of more than one hundred works on paper—from finished watercolors to sketchbooks, from copies after old master prints to preparatory drawings for important projects—this exhibition explores the central role of drawing in Delacroix’s practice.
Darien Library is hosting a lecture Thursday from 7 to 8:30 p.m.inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence, on display March 12 through July 29. From the Second Empire until the beginning of World War I, France blossomed —literally and figuratively. During this period, the country experienced a horticultural boom, as a flood of new and exotic botanical specimens became available for both public and private gardens.
At the same time, Baron Haussmann’s spectacular transformation of Paris into a modern city of tree-lined boulevards and public parks, encouraged people to spend their leisure time promenading in these new green spaces, where they could “see” and “be seen,” and spurred a mania for both the cultivation and depiction of flower gardens. — an announcement from Darien Library
Offering myriad stylistic and chromatic possibilities, this distinctive scenery of contemporary French life was taken up again and again by the most avant-garde artists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Seurat, Bonnard, and Matisse, many of whom were gardeners themselves.
