500 Years of Prints and Drawings Part I: The Image of Nature in Nineteenth-Century French Prints

This Fall, the Blanton presents a four-year series entitled 500 Years of Prints and Drawings, which will feature groups of intimate exhibitions that highlight the Blanton's encyclopedic collection of works on paper. With works of art representing the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries, the series draws exclusively from the Museum's own collection to present focused inquiries into an artist, technique, process, or artistic trend particular to a period of time in the history of Western art.

The five current exhibitions embody this broad range of approaches, reflecting the Museum's ongoing and innovative research and the range, depth, and quality of its renowned collection. Each can be enjoyed on its own as a thematic exploration of works from one specific century; together, the exhibitions trace the history of the graphic arts since the Renaissance, revealing the rich array of traditions, techniques, uses, and developments of works on paper in Europe and the United States.

Featuring works by Corot, Daubigny, and other 19th-century French printmakers, this exhibition examines how artists responded to the explosion of industrialization and urbanization in 19th-century France by focusing on the landscape in their work. The prints presented in this exhibition demonstrate how nostalgia for a less complicated past fueled the rise of the landscape from a lesser category at the beginning of the century to the central artistic theme by its end, reflecting a desire to preserve, if not nature itself, at least its image.

This exhibition was organized by Jonathan Bober, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and European Paintings.