The French Collection

The Museum's emphasis on the French painting collection reflects the traditional taste of New Orleans which was originally a French city. Landscape paintings, from the sublime sunset of Claude Lorrain's Ideal View of Tivoli to the fashionable Park of St. Cloud by Hubert Robert, has been an abiding interest of French artists. Charming rococo scenes by François Boucher and Charles Joseph Natoire are perennial favorites. By far the largest and grandest painting in these galleries is Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Lebrun's Portrait of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, which was commissioned by the King's younger brother, the Comte d'Artois. Marie's husband, King Louis XIV, is resplendent in Antoine-François Callet's portrait documenting the last years of the ancien régime.

The Museum is fortunate to have an important oil sketch for Baron Gros's most famous painting, Pest House at Jaffa, which depicts a controversial episode of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. Ever aware of the propagandistic power of his image, Napoleon reportedly insisted that the artist present him in a more heroic pose in the final version. Continued French fascination with an exotic vision of North Africa is manifest in the precise genre paintings of chess players and snake charmers by Gérôme. His contemporary colleague William-Adolphe Bouguereau was immensely popular for works like Whisperings of Lovein which academic realism was tempered by a lyric sweetness.