Director’s Foreword and Acknowledgments

Lane, John R.

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Director’s Foreword and Acknowledgments

John R. Lane

Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette

Director’s Foreword and Acknowledgments

Author

John R. Lane

PublisherDallas Museum of Art

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22956

Director’s Foreword and Acknowledgments

Anne Vallayer-Coster was considered the foremost French still-life painter of her generation. One of only four women elected to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in the years preceding the French Revolution, Vallayer-Coster won the acclaim of critics and the patronage of the queen, Marie-Antoinette. Yet her achievements have in ensuing years gone largely unheralded and underappreciated and, remarkably, this is the first major exhibition dedicated to her art. In it, and in this accompanying publication, we explore her importance to the genre of still-life painting, her relationship to other still-life painters of the period, the cultural and political worlds of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century France in which she was involved, and the position of herself and other women as artists and patrons in the decades surrounding the French Revolution.

The idea for this exhibition arose from the purchase for the Dallas Museum of Art in 1996 of a splendid pair of floral still-life paintings by this gifted artist. Our then assistant curator of European art, Eik Kahng (now associate curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), seized on the acquisition as an incentive to initiate the project, which she did with the support of my predecessor, Jay Gates, and the informed encouragement of Dorothy Kosinski, the Museum’s Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art. Much to our delight, the interest of the Dallas Museum of Art in the exhibition was reciprocated by The Frick Collection, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. We thank our colleagues at The Frick Collection, Samuel Sachs II, Director, Edgar Munhall, former Chief Curator, and Colin B. Bailey, Chief Curator; at the National Gallery of Art, Earl A. Powell III, Director, Philip Conisbee, Senior Curator of European Paintings, and D. Dodge Thompson, Chief of Exhibitions, for their supportive engagement with this cultural enterprise and the presentation of the exhibition at their institutions.

Building on the benevolence of the Foundation for the Arts through its Mrs. John B. O’Hara Fund, which was instrumental in bringing the Vallayer-Coster paintings into the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, key individuals in the Dallas community rallied around the idea of enriching the Museum’s diverse special exhibitions program by mounting an old master painting show. In particular, Michael L. Rosenberg, a distinguished collector of eighteenth-century French art who has served as a trustee of the Museum and who had himself contributed generously to the acquisition of our Vallayer-Coster paintings, immediately expressed his support for the project, and we appreciate enormously his commitment, which underwrote this ambitious scholarly publication. We are indebted, too, to Charlene C. and Tom F. Marsh and to Debbie and John Tolleson for their early support. We gratefully acknowledge the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for its significant grant in aid of the research phase of the project. Lead sponsorship of this exhibition has been graciously afforded by the Dallas Museum of Art League, and we extend special thanks to the League membership, its past-year president, Cynthia Mitchell, and its current president, Susan Fisk, who designated substantial funding to help the Museum realize this undertaking. We are very much obliged to the many institutional and individual lenders who so generously agreed to share their works of art for the duration of this exhibition. And, we give our heartfelt thanks and compliments to Eik Kahng for her dedicated and erudite endeavors as organizing curator of Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette and scholarly contributor to this book.

The Dallas Museum of Art and Eik Kahng join to recognize with appreciation the many individuals who have contributed to the realization of this project. Marianne Roland Michel could not have been kinder or more helpful to its development, for which we warmly thank her and add our gratitude for her catalogue essay and contributions as co-editor, as well. We offer a similar expression of appreciation to our other authors, Colin B. Bailey, Claire Barry, Melissa Hyde, and Laurent Hugues. For their invaluable advice we thank Claire Barry, Philip Conisbee, Melissa Hyde, and John Goodman, who also acted as our translator from the French. We appreciate the efforts on behalf of the making of this book of Laura Hulscher, Susan Kelly, Matt Lechner, Ed Marquand, Jennifer Sugden, Marta Vinnedge, and Marie Weiler at Marquand Books, of its copy editor, Fronia W. Simpson, of its proofreader and indexer, Frances Bowles, of its proofreader, Sharon Vonasch, and of Patricia Fidler representing our copublishers at Yale University Press. We thank the many individuals who have so generously shared their scholarship, connoisseurship, institutional resources, and passion for our artist and this project: Jean-Pierre Angremy, Pierre Arizzoli-Clementel, Katherine Baetjer, Joseph Baillio, Roger M. Berkowitz, Delphine Bishop, Thomas and Brenda Brod, Thomas Campbell, Toby Campbell, Dominique Cante, Görel Cavalli-Björkman, Françoise Chaserant, Blandine Chavanne, Alvin L. Clark Jr., Michael Clarke, James Clifton, Elizabeth Conran, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Gail Davidson, Bruno Desmarest, Fabrice Faré, Hélène Fauré, Jacques Foucart, Clara Gelly-Saldias, Jean Gismondi, Diane De Grazia, Dominik Gügel, Torsten Gunnarsson, Rosann Gutman, Wilhelmina Holladay, Laurent Hugues, Adrian Jenkins, Isabelle Julia, William Johnston, Jan Kelch, Jim Landman, Paul Lang, Patrick Le Chanu, Jean-Marc Léri, Christophe Leribault, David Liot, Stéphane Loire, Henri Loyrette, Dietmar Lüdke, Patrick Matthiesen, Cäsar Menz, Philippe de Montebello, Brigitte Monti, Edgar Munhall, Steven A. Nash, Lawrence W. Nichols, Lynn Federle Orr, Harry S. Parker, Joachim Pissarro, Jean-Pierre Ravaux, Katherine Lee Reid, Francis Ribemont, Pierre Rosenberg, Marie-Catherine Sahut, Nicolas Sainte-Fare Garnot, Béatrice Salmon, Xavier Salmon, Alan Salz, Klaus Schrenk, Marion C. Stewart, Charles Stuckey, Marilyn Symmes, Joakim Tan, Burton Tansky, Pierre Théberge, Paul Warwick Thompson, Eric Turquin, Gary Vikan, Jeffrey Weiss, Alan Wintermute, and Andrea Zanella.

At the Dallas Museum of Art, Leslie Ureña, curatorial administrative assistant, Beverly Gibbons, volunteer intern, and their French counterpart, Mélanie Leboucher, were devoted in their efforts on behalf of the project, and Dr. Kosinski and Deputy Director Bonnie Pitman provided wise leadership at important junctures. Other members of the Museum’s staff who are due particular acknowledgment include Kim Beachum, Carolyn Bess, Giselle Castro-Brightenburg, Judy Conner, Gail Davitt, Diana Duke Duncan, Brad Flowers, Robert Goodman, Andrea Guidry, Tom Jenkins, Rita Lasater, Mary Leonard, Michael Mazurek, Debra Phares, Dan Rockwell, Gabriela Truly, Charles Venable, and Tamara Wootton-Bonner.

JOHN R. LANE

The Eugene McDermott Director

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