New York City.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art is pleased to present “Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th Century Europe” until August 14th in the 2nd floor Drawings, Prints, and Photographs Galleries. By 1750, almost 2,500 professional artists and amateurs were working in pastel in Paris alone. Portraits in pastel were commissioned by all ranks of society, but most enthusiastically by the royal family, members of the court, and the wealthy middle classes. Eighteenth-century pastels are brightly colored, highly finished, often of large dimensions, and elaborately framed, evoking oil painting, the medium to which they were invariably compared. The powdery texture of pastel and its diffuse, velvety quality were particularly suited to capturing the fleeting expressions that characterize the most life-like portraits. Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century Europe includes some forty pastels, belonging to the Metropolitan Museum and, with important exceptions, to museums and private collections in the New York area. It presents Italian, French, and English works, supplemented by several German, Swiss, and American examples.

Pastel Portraits begins with Gustavus Hamilton (1710-46), “Second Viscount Boyne” and the beautiful “Young Woman with Pearl Earrings” by Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera, who became a favorite of Grand Tourists in Italy and who visited Paris to acclaim in 1720. It features a number of important pastels by Maurice Quentin de La Tour and Jean Baptiste Perronneau, two of the outstanding artists working in this medium in mid-18th-century Paris. Among the highlights of the exhibition are “Jacques Dumont le Romain” by La Tour  (1701-81) and “Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet (1684-1761), Maréchal de France”; “Olivier Journu (1724-64)” by Perronneau; “Madame Elisabeth de France (1764-94)”, the sister of Louis XVI, a recent gift to the Metropolitan Museum by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard; “Young Woman in Turkish Costume with a Tambourine” by Jean Étienne Liotard, and “John Collins of Devizes” by John Russell. The popularity and appeal of pastel in the 18th century reached as far as Boston, where John Singleton Copley, who was self-taught and had never seen an important European work in the medium, created exceptional portraits. Two Copleys, also recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum, are on view.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (colloquially The Met) is an art museum on the eastern edge of Central Park, along “Museum Mile” in New York City, United States. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, often called “the Met”, is one of the world’s largest art galleries; there is also a much smaller second location, at “The Cloisters”, in Upper Manhattan, which features medieval art. Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens. The founders included businessmen and financiers, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. Today, the Met measures almost 1/4-mile (400 m) long and occupies more than 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2). The Met’s permanent collection is cared for and exhibited by seventeen separate curatorial departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as four dedicated conservation departments and a department of scientific research.

Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art. After negotiations with the City of New York in 1871, the Met was granted the land between the East Park Drive, Fifth Avenue, and the 79th and 85th Street Transverse Roads in Central Park. A red-brick and stone “mausoleum” was designed by American architect Calvert Vaux and his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould. Vaux’s ambitious building was not well-received; the building’s High Victorian Gothic style being already dated prior to completion, and the president of the Met termed the project “a mistake.” Within 20 years, a new architectural plan engulfing the Vaux building was already being executed. Since that time, many additions have been made including the distinctive Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade, Great Hall, and Grand Stairway. These were designed by architect and Met trustee Richard Morris Hunt, but completed by his son, Richard Howland Hunt in 1902 after his father’s death. The wings that completed the Fifth Avenue facade in the 1910s were designed by the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. The modernistic sides and rear of the museum were the work of Roche, Dinkeloo, and Associates in the 1970s and 1980s. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.metmuseum.org/

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