Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris

During the final decades of the ancien regime, prominent collectors in Paris commissioned and collected French paintings of the period, works by Greuze, Fragonard, David, and others that together comprised l'Ecole Francoise, the French School. In this work, an eminent art historian discusses six of these collectors and the collections they assembled, showing that private patronage in this period was revitalized by this patriotic desire to collect contemporary art.