Exhibition at the museum
Impressionism and Fashion
From September 25th, 2012 to January 20th, 2013
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Jeune dame en 1866, dite aussi la femme au perroquet, 1866
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
don d'Erwin Davis, 1889
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA / DR
Although they did not strive to render scrupulously the physiognomy, costume or habit, the Impressionists nevertheless accounted for the fashions and attitudes of their times. They achieved this through their keenness to consider the portrait as a snapshot of a person in his/her familiar settings, through their ability to renew the genre works from the double point of view of typology and topography and above all through their attention to the "daily metamorphosis of exterior things", as Baudelaire put it.
With their aesthetic positions, the reality of men and women of the years between 1860 and 1880 and their clothes underwent an undisputable transfiguration.
The exhibition is now over.
See the whole program