Say what you will, but as far as I’m concerned, Paris is the capital of the world.

Well, if we have any pride in ourselves as human beings, it should be. There may be other cities that could lay claim to that title on the basis of commerce, power, wealth or sheer size, but Paris, if aliens were to come down and ask, represents what a beautiful, entrancing, inspirational, livable, colorful and spectacularly glorious city we humans can make if we set our minds to it and back it up with our finest craftsmen, architects, designers and artists.

Little wonder it has been attracting the attention of artists for generations, particularly American artists in the latter half of the 19th Century, who flocked there for inspiration, instruction and to connect with the planet’s glowing center of art and culture.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (a city that is no slouch when it comes to culture but, sorry, isn’t in the same league with Paris), is hosting an absolutely wonderful exhibit of some of the American painters who went to Paris at that time to study and exhibit, in other words, some of the best American painters ever. This list includes many of the painters I particularly admire because they fit into the area of “realism under the influence of Impressionism” that I really enjoy.

The show is called Americans in Paris and is a spectacularly high-level show, featuring great works by John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, James McNeil Whistler, Celia Beaux, John Henry Twatchman, Charles Courtney Curran, J. Alden Weir, Robert Vonnoh, John White Alexander, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, William Metcalf, Charles Sprague Pearce, Charles Edmund Tarbell and more.

Wow.

(Image above, clockwise from top-left: Sargent, Alexander, Curran, Pearce, Hassam, Whistler.)

The exhibit not only features these great artists, but many are represented by some of their best works, including several paintings that I have wanted to see in person for years, like Sargent’s stunning group portrait of The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit and Fishing for Oysters at Cancale (the small version), Alexander’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil (that I show here), Hassam’s Grand Prix Day and unexpected delights like Charles Curran’s Afternoon in the Cluny Garden, Paris, Harry van der Weyden’s Morning Labor on the Seine and several amazing little paintings by Charles Sprague Pearce.

The show runs from yesterday, October 24th, 2006, to January 28, 2007. I plan to see it again if I can. Short of traveling to Paris (sigh), it’s as close as I can get in terms of inspiration for this American.

[Addendum, 2012: Americans in Paris archive at the Met is now here.]

I’m in New York for a few days (hence no post yesterday), and I had a chance to see a number of shows. One is a small but beautiful show of French Rococo drawings at the newly renovated and expanded Morgan Library and Museum, “Fragonard and the French Tradition“, with drawings by Fragonard, his mentors Francois Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire, and contemporaries Hubert Robert, Jean-Babtiste Greuze and Jacques-Louis David.

The exhibit is drawn (if you’ll excuse the expression) from the Morgan’s own superb collection. The show is small, but beautiful.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French Rococo painter whose playful, sensual and often erotic canvasses, along with those of Boucher, exemplify the voluptuously romantic visions of the period.

Fragonard’s drawings, most often executed in brown inks and wash, are wonderful in their ability to appear richly detailed while, in fact, having a remarkable economy of line and texture. Foliage that might be represented by hundreds of curved strokes in the drawings of other artists, even in the case of that sublime master of quick suggestion, Rembrandt, are created by Fragonard in a flurried illusion of wonderful scribbles that somehow convince your eye that you are, indeed, looking a leaves and branches.

The luxurious color and detail in his paintings are a fascinating contrast to the directness and quick suggestion of his drawings. If you go to the Morgan show and want to see that contrast, go uptown to the Frick Collection to see their wonderful examples of his paintings from the series titled “The Progress of Love”.