24 September - 13 December 2008
Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow
Open Monday - Saturday, 9.30am - 5.00pm
Closed Sundays and 26 - 29 September 2008 inclusive
Admission free

A new exhibition dedicated to two of the greatest French painters opens at the Hunterian Art Gallery next week.

Described as an "exquisite exhibition", and a "really enjoyable collection of pictures in a well-managed small exhibition" by the national press, "Boucher & Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners" has been developed by the Hunterian in conjunction with the Wallace Collection, London, where it is on show until 7 September 2008.

The exhibition celebrates two of the greatest French painters and their artistic response to the rising taste for genre paintings featuring women in modern interiors in 18th century France. Two masterpieces take centre stage: Boucher's Woman on a Daybed, 1743, from the renowned Frick Collection in New York, on show in Britain for the first time in seventy years, and Chardin's near contemporary, Lady taking Tea, 1735, from the Hunterian collection. United with other important contemporary genre scenes by Boucher and Chardin, they evoke a classical moment in the development of French genre painting.

The Frick Collection's Woman on a Daybed is one of the quintessential French rococo paintings, while Chardin's Lady taking Tea has always been regarded as one of his masterworks and is today considered his single most important figure painting. For the first time since the eighteenth century, it will be re-united with its likely pendant, The House of Cards which has recently been acquired by an English family trust. Further genre paintings by both artists and their contemporaries will evoke the situation in French genre painting at a "moment of perfection".

A tea pot and tea cups feature prominently in the background in Boucher's interior, while drinking tea is the main focus of Chardin's painting. The common subject of tea drinking is further explored in French and English works of the same period. In England, William Hogarth (represented in the exhibition by his Western Family from the National Gallery of Ireland) takes an ambivalent approach, depicting tea drinking as wholesome but also as a symbol of the dangers of luxury.

While the exhibition focuses on French genre painting and depictions of tea drinking, it also evokes the background of tea drinking through a small selection of objects and books.

Excitingly, visitors to the Hunterian showing of Boucher & Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners will be able to enjoy the presence of a number of loans exclusive to Glasgow as well as an additional room dedicated to prints after Boucher and Chardin.

Highlights exclusive to the Hunterian will include another important masterpiece by Boucher, Woman fastening her Garter from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid; the National Gallery of Scotland's charming drawing of a Group at Tea by Marcellus Laroon, a delightful Chinese pagoda of a smiling god from the Burrell Collection, and a selection of oriental decorative art objects and prints from the Hunterian's own collections.

Nowhere is Boucher's fascination for China more apparent than in his exquisite Woman Fastening her Garter. Painted more or less at the same time as Chardin's The Morning Toilet, on loan from the National Museum in Stockholm, it offers a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the two artists' interpretation of the fashionable theme of the toilet (this was the first and last that they tackled the same subject).

Praise for Boucher & Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners

"This week a new show opens ... that documents the development of genre painting in France, and largely through a handful of exquisite works by Boucher and Chardin." "... this exhibition is so infused with tea that, almost as if to slake our developing thirst for the substance, the curator has decided to include within its remit some of the paraphernalia of 18th-century tea drinking, examples of the kind of things that are everywhere in the paintings we have just been looking at." 4 Stars.
Michael Glover, "Let them drink tea", The Times Arts section, 10 June 2008

"Boucher and Chardin are chalk and cheese, fluff and granite, but this show brings them together to considerable effect, and to our definite advantage. A series of loans from such eminent collections as the Frick in New York and the Hunterian in Glasgow makes this display an unmissable event".
Andrew Lambirth, "Fluff and granite", The Spectator, 21 June 2008

"London's prettiest museum, the Wallace Collection, is displaying uncharacteristic meatiness in building a fine exhibition around the telling contrast between Boucher's Woman on a Daybed and Chardin's Lady taking Tea."
Waldemar Januszczak, "The porn king and the puritan", The Sunday Times Culture, 22 June 2008

"...this exquisite exhibition..." is "...immaculate - the visual equivalent of a splendid chamber concert".
Alastair Sooke, "A seductive riot of detail", The Daily Telegraph, 8 July 2008

Direct line: +44 (0)141 330 3310

www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk