Art Review: ‘True to Nature: Open-air Painting in Europe’

True to Nature: Open-air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870 is the straightforward, even banal title of an extraordinary exhibition, shown at an extraordinary place few Americans, I think, even know. The show of 115 small paintings, all done outdoors, with the subject before the artist, is at the Custodia Foundation, a museum, archive, and think tank on rue de Lille in Paris. I’d never visited. I knew it for its collection of Old Master drawings and prints, its 40,000-item archive of letters written by artists, and its Dutch founder, Frits Lugt.

Lugt (1884–1970) compiled the definitive catalogue of collector marks for drawings and prints. Doesn’t sound Gertrude Ederle snazzy, I know, but it’s essential. He deciphered thousands of small, stamped symbols or initials, almost always on the back of prints and drawings, identifying who owned them and creating the foundation for provenance and collection-history studies. Lugt might not have been good fodder for a Hollywood movie, though Nazis and Rembrandt figure in his life, and those artist letters are sometimes steamy. Still, he was a child prodigy, writing a biography of Rembrandt at age 14, illustrated with his own drawings. And he’s the art historian with the most scholarly citations to his name.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

True to Nature: Open-air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870 is the straightforward, even banal title of an extraordinary exhibition, shown at an extraordinary place few Americans, I think, even know. The show of 115 small paintings, all done outdoors, with the subject before the artist, is at the Custodia Foundation, a museum, archive, and think tank on rue de Lille in Paris. I’d never visited. I knew it for its collection of Old Master drawings and prints, its 40,000-item archive of letters written by artists, and its Dutch founder, Frits Lugt.

Lugt (1884–1970) compiled the definitive catalogue of collector marks for drawings and prints. Doesn’t sound Gertrude Ederle snazzy, I know, but it’s essential. He deciphered thousands of small, stamped symbols or initials, almost always on the back of prints and drawings, identifying who owned them and creating the foundation for provenance and collection-history studies. Lugt might not have been good fodder for a Hollywood movie, though Nazis and Rembrandt figure in his life, and those artist letters are sometimes steamy. Still, he was a child prodigy, writing a biography of Rembrandt at age 14, illustrated with his own drawings. And he’s the art historian with the most scholarly citations to his name.