French Painting from the Pushkin Museum

📘 For art lovers unable to visit Soviet museums, for anyone fascinated by painters views of past and present times, this large and brilliant display of French paintings in the Pushkin Museum is a source of lasting joy. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow is Russia's second largest, next only to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, and its assemblage of French art is among the finest in the world. All the major genres and schools of France are represented, including portraiture, landscape and historical painting, and the incomparable Impressionist vision of the world. The 281 paintings by 140 artists represented here in magnificent reproductions span some 300 years, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. There are masterpieces by such artists as Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Boucher, Corot, Degas, Renotr, Monet, Cezanne, Leger, Matisse, and Picasso, together with paintings that have rarely been reproduced and are little known. Irina Kuznetsova and Evgenia Georgievskaya, curators of the museum, have written commentaries on each of the pictures and compiled an extensive provenance and bibliography for each work. Their complete catalogue of the French paintings in the Pushkin Museum, as well as an index of exhibitions spanning the last 250 years, are an invaluable contribution to our knowledge. Their history of the Museum affords many insights into private collecting in old Russia. Visual splendor and factual information are combined in this superb volume on one of the world...