NEW YORK.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents today “Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism,” on view through January 4, 2004. Some 100 paintings and 35 works on paper by such artists as Constable, Turner, Delacroix, and Géricault chart the rich cultural exchanges between Britain and France between 1820 and 1840. A selection of major works that created a dialogue between the two national schools emphasizes artistic affinities in terms of subject, technique, and theoretical approaches, showing that British art made a defining contribution to French Romanticism. The exhibition is made possible by United Technologies Corporation. The exhibition was organized by Tate Britain, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Accompanied by a catalogue.

“Crossing the Channel” places a particularly strong emphasis on the influence British artists had on their French counterparts in the early half of the nineteenth century. Many French artists at that time were fascinated with English and Scottish culture, and this played a significant role in the development of modern French art. Themes of history and literature, contemporary life, landscape, portraits, and salons are explored with loans from public and private international collections such as the National Gallery, London; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The exhibition analyzes the key cultural events that influenced artists from both nations, such as the publication in Edinburgh, Scotland, of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel, Ivanhoe, which had an immediate and profound impact on French literature and painting. It also features a section dedicated to Géricault’s painting Raft of the Medusa–one of the most dramatic and controversial paintings in art history. The Raft was shown in a highly successful 1820 exhibition in London; its impact is recreated in this exhibition’s magnificent full-scale copy of the masterpiece, executed in 1859 by French Academicians.

The premise of “Crossing the Channel” is thus: During the tumultuous period that began with the Restoration of the French monarchy (following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815) and ended with the accession of Queen Victoria to the British throne in 1837, a profound engagement between two previously unsympathetic schools of painting resulted in innovations that would radically affect the course of modern art in Western Europe. This hypothesis is neither new nor necessarily disputed. The two titans of French Romanticism, Géricault and Delacroix, confirm it through their own practices; yet surprisingly the conjecture has never been rigorously tested by bringing together the very pictures that were scrutinized by artists from both nations and that defined the critical discourses of the epoch.

This exhibition has sought to orchestrate such a reunion and thus augment the exceedingly scarce literature on the subject. The majority of the oil paintings appeared in the principal exhibition venues during the 1820s and were subject to the most trenchant examinations and comparisons. Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, Constable’s White Horse, David Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners, and Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi were the archetypes of a new pictorial sensibility. Another group of exemplary oils by Bonington, Delacroix, and their immediate circle, who were inspired by British literature, were probably painted contemporaneously in the same studio. This primary technical collaboration between the young British artist and arguably the most literate and influential painter of the century was as momentous as that of Picasso and Braque at the dawn of Cubism.

In assembling these indisputable masterpieces for the first time in almost two centuries, “Crossing the Channel” provides the essential comparative materials for a renewed consideration of British romanticism as a major force in the evolution of French art. It is certainly significant that so captivating a subject as the origins of modern painting might originate in the unexpected collision of such fiercely competitive yet fundamentally sympathetic spirits.

The exhibition is organized thematically to include topics such as The Raft of the Medusa; The Rise of Watercolor; Landscape Painting in Britain and France; Painters of Modern Life: History, Genre, Portraiture, Animals; and Literature and History. The display of the Raft recreates for visitors the experience of a visit to a small, private exhibition involving one major work. There is also a splendid recreation of the 1820s salons that offers the experience of a grand Parisian gallery. This magnificent gallery of pictures comprises works that were shown at the Louvre in Paris and at the Royal Academy in London.