NOMA | New Orleans Museum of Art

The French Collection

NOMA’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 visitor 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 XVI, is resplendent in Antoine-François Callet’s portrait documenting the last years of the ancien régime.

NOMA 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. Always 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.

French fascination with an exotic vision of North Africa is represented in genre paintings of chess players and snake charmers by Gérôme. His contemporary colleague William-Adolphe Bouguereau was immensely popular for works like Whisperings of Love in which is one of NOMA’s most popular paintings.