Newsletter: Winter 2002

In its loose, open brushwork, vivid colors, and free rhythms of paint, Joseph-Marie Vien's Love Fleeing Slavery epitomizes the spontaneity of the oil sketch, a quality that has often made such works more desirable to collectors than finished paintings. Despite the coy subject matter, the composition is influenced by the dramatic stule of Vien's student Jacques-Louis David, who by the late 1780s was the most influential artist of the French scene. This historically important work... speaks to a moment in French art poised between the Rococo and Neoclassicism.