François Le Moyne

Descrizione

This new monograph and catalogue raisonné of Le Moyne’s career and œuvre represent the results of forty years of additional research since the publication in 1984 of the author’s first work on this artist, the master of both Charles-Joseph Natoire and François Boucher. For the first time in Le Moyne’s connoisseurship, the new publication of 130 paintings and 250 drawings and pastels, most of them reproduced in colour and with spectacular detail, has been integrated with a long list of his lost easel works, described in auction catalogues or documented collections. In this revised and enriched study, the artist’s varied and opulent career and his role as creator of a more seductive ideal of female nudity have been discussed in greater details depicting Le Moyne as the historical and academic artist, the original creator of gallant mythologies, the highly skilled and sensitive colorist and draftsman, painter of religious subjects, landscapes, overdoors and large-scale ceiling paintings, genre motifs and portraits, and at last as the man who committed the most dramatic suicide in the entire history of the world art.