Jean-Baptiste Perronneau
A Master Portraitist in Enlightenment-Era Europe

From June 17 to September 17, 2017, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans is presenting the first retrospective dedicated to Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (c. 1715–1783), a truly brilliant portraitist with a unique and demanding artistic personality. This exhibition invites visitors to explore Europe during the Age of Enlightenment—a period marked by the most extraordinary enthusiasm for portraiture ever seen—through 120 works drawn from prestigious public collections (the Louvre, the National Gallery, and others) and private collections, many of which have never been exhibited before, as well as from the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, which houses the most extensive collection of the artist’s works.

Following a chronological timeline, the exhibition traces the painter’s (1734–1782) incredible career, from his training and dazzling early career in Paris—marked by his admission to the Royal Academy in 1753—to the travels that took him to cities in France (Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Orléans) and Europe (Brussels, Rome, London) before making Amsterdam his home base and launching point for journeys to Hanseatic cities such as Hamburg, as well as to Saint Petersburg and Warsaw. Illustrating the^18th-century taste for brilliance and splendor, Perronneau’s pastels are displayed here alongside his oil portraits and—as was customary for their patrons at the time—paintings by the Old Masters, works by the artist’s contemporary painters and sculptors, as well as decorative art objects. Taken together, they offer a fresh perspective on this portraitist, who was too quickly dismissed as the hapless rival of Maurice Quentin Delatour (1704–1788) but who, on the contrary, proves to be a virtuoso artist whose career stands out distinctly from that of his contemporaries. His social networks, in fact, encompass the entire century more comprehensively than those of other painters, with a new segment of his clientele consisting of figures from trade and big business, whom artistic society ennobled.

The exhibition traces the connections Perronneau forged during his many travels with art lovers, particularly his long friendship with Aignan Thomas Desfriches—a wealthy entrepreneur from Orléans and future founder of the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans—which inspired a series of pastels that rank among the most significant of his career. Since 1860, the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans,(delete the comma) has continued to acquire works by Perronneau, culminating in the purchase in June 2016 of a masterpiece—the portrait of Aignan Thomas Desfriches—after which the museum sought to place Perronneau’s work back in its historical context with this first retrospective.