Color, Line, Light

Text by Alex|PHOTOARTEL ( All images are clickable ) If the gruesome scene of publicly administered autolesion (dubbed sequestration) contradicts your definition of eye candy, there is a publicly available alternative across 3rd St NW. NGA, in concert with Musée des impressionnismes Giverny, is hosting a remarkable exhibition dubbed Dyke's collection, after Mr. Dyke, a “renowned collector of 19th- and 20th-century French works on paper”. Color, Line, Light: French Drawings, Watercolors, and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac is organized chronologically into sections,  that correspond roughly to 5 major stylistic movements flourished during the 19th century: - Romanticism ( Eugène Delacroix ) - Realism and Naturalism (  Albert Besnard,  Leon Augustin Lhermitte ), - Impressionism ( Claude Monet,  Edgar Degas ) - Nabis and Symbolists ( Pierre Bonnard,  Édouard Vuillard ) - Neo-impressionism ( Charles Angrand, Paul Signac ). My first encounter with "19th- and 20th-century French works on paper" can be traced back to the never-ending pre-school days, when, apparently, tired of producing all the noise in the house, little me rested with thigh thick folio full of vellum protected hypnotizing drawings, telling some millenniums old story. Much later I learned the word millennium. And the title of the book. And the name of the illustrator engraved in my memory. Shamefully I failed to attribute his conspicuous name to a handful of landscapes, as never imagined him wasting his precise precious stroke en plein air. While the flock streamed for Signac, I couldn't help but admiring the diversity of my life old teacher, Gustave Dore.

Gustav Dore "The Shades of French Soldiers from the Past Exhort the Army to Victory on the Rhine"

Gustave Dore "Coastal Landscape"

Gustave Dore "A River Gorge in a Mountain Landscape"

Gustave Dore Landscape

Eugène Delacroix "Normandy Cliffs"

Auguste Louis Lepere "Chestnut Trees above a River"

Paul Huet "A Meadow at Sunset"

Leon-Augustin Lhermitte " An Elderly Peasant Woman"

Paul Gavarni "Pierrot's son asking fatherly advice"

Claude Monet "Waterloo Bridge"

Edgar Degas "A Dancer at the Bar"

Édouard Vuillard "The Dressmaker"

Pierre Bonnard   "The Promenade"

Paul Signac "Barges on the Seine at Samois"

Charles Angrand "Annunciation to the Shepherds"