08.April 2011 - 11.September 2011

Tour de France. French Landscape Painting

TOUR de FRANCE. French Landscapes is devised as an art historical parallel to the Tour de France of cycling. In contrast to the bicycle race, the French landscape is not experienced through the eye of a camera, but through the eyes of – among others – Corot, Manet, Sisley and Gauguin. Consequently, these artists’ tools were not bicycles but an easel and a palette. Nevertheless, their images from the nineteenth century, painted on country roads, in the forest and along rivers, effectively overtook the Italianate landscapes favoured by the Salon and divided art history into a before and an after.

Ordrupgaard’s Tour de France is a journey in time and space where art history, seen through the museum’s own artworks, unfolds in various stylistic stages and landscape scenes. The occasion for the exhibition is the publishing of the museum’s research based catalogue, French Art at Ordrupgaard, of the impressive collection of French art.

Read more about the exhibition here.