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Oct. 3--That Baltimore's museums are awash in 19th-century French art is largely because of the efforts of George Lucas, a homegrown aesthete whose passion for the art of his time left a permanent mark on his native city.
Lucas' contribution to Baltimore's cultural legacy is evident in the extensive collection of some 20,000 artworks that he amassed as an expatriate in France during the second half of the 19th century and bequeathed in 1909 to the Maryland Institute College of Art.
There are atmospheric landscapes by the painters of the Barbizon School, dramatic sculptures of wild animals by Antoine-Louis Barye, figure studies, portraits and genre pictures by leading artists of the era, and even a selection of the pigment-encrusted palettes originally owned by the painters Lucas favored.
Now the Lucas Collection, which was purchased in 1996 from MICA by the Baltimore Museum of Art, is the subject of A View Toward Paris, a spectacular exhibition at the BMA featuring nearly 200 works of art -- paintings, sculpture and works on paper -- that Lucas acquired during the five decades he lived abroad.
The show includes works by some of the century's most important artists, including Eugene Delacroix, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Honore Daumier and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
Born in 1824, the scion of a prominent local family that had made its fortune in stationery products and publishing, Lucas was expected to enter the family business. But he had other ideas.
After attending St. Mary's College and later the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he studied civil engineering, Lucas embarked in 1857 for Paris, the center of the 19th-century art world.
In the City of Light, the young man immersed himself in the heady atmosphere of artistic ferment all around him and never looked back.
From his base in Paris, Lucas visited painters' studios and developed a business advising wealthy American collectors like William and Henry Walters of Baltimore, William Corcoran of Washington and New York's William Henry Vanderbilt on which artists to buy and how much to pay.
His career as an art broker afforded ample opportunity to befriend artists he admired and to purchase examples of their work for his own growing collection, which reflected his personal interests and tastes. He was a particular fan of Barye, the American expatriate (and fellow West Pointer) James McNeill Whistler and Impressionist pioneer Edouard Manet.
The Lucas Collection is one the few 19th-century collections that has remained virtually intact. (During the 1996 sale, the Walters Art Museum also acquired several of Lucas' paintings and sculptures.) Thus it offers a rare opportunity to experience art through the eyes of someone who was collecting it at the time it was made.
Sona Johnston, the BMA's senior curator of painting and sculpture, has sensibly divided the exhibition into four sections corresponding to the major tendencies in French art around which Lucas formed his collection: academic art, romanticism, realism and the precursors of modernism.
Among the many gems in the show is Corot's lovely View Towards Paris (1858-1864), which exemplifies the Barbizon School of landscape painting that profoundly influenced the Impressionists a decade later.
Corot's bucolic scene depicts a country lane near the edge of the Fontainebleau forest on a brilliant summer day. Billowing white clouds float across the azure sky, and the rustic quietude of the scene makes the bustling metropolis of Paris, barely visible on the horizon, seem as distant as another planet.
In 1996, the BMA paid $8.5 million for the entire Lucas Collection (with the state putting up half the purchase price); today, Corot's painting alone is probably worth at least as much as the state's contribution. The Lucas Collection is a priceless asset for this city and its people, and the BMA's superb debut exhibition of its new free admission policy counts as one of the season's must-see events.
glenn.mcnatt@baltsun.com
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Baltimore Sun
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