The second book in the “Discover� series, this illuminating study explores Liotard’s little-known The Lavergne Family Breakfast (1754), widely regarded as a pastel masterpiece   Jean-Etienne Liotard’s The Lavergne Family Breakfast, acquired by the National Gallery in 2019, is one of the Gallery’s most important eighteenth-century pictures and the artist’s largest and most ambitious pastel. Last exhibited in 1754, when Liotard brought the pastel from Lyon to London (an incredible feat in itself given the fragility of pastel), it has hardly been seen in public since. Exploring the pastel medium, Liotard’s itinerant career and the stories behind the objects he depicts, this catalogue puts Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast in the spotlight.   Liotard was a flamboyant artist and unusually well travelled for his time, and his own journeys across the length and breadth of Europe are considered alongside the voyages implicit in the components of the still life: coffee, porcelain and sugar. This discussion allows much wider elements of social history and the histories of travel and trade to be woven into the book. This beautifully illustrated publication offers readers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth century and an accessible introduction to a particularly idiosyncratic and gifted artist.   Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press   Exhibition Schedule:   The National Gallery, London (November 16, 2023–March 3, 2024)

Poussin's scenes of bacchanalian revelry, tripping maenads and skipping nymphs are often described as 'dancelike' and 'choreographed'. The artist's dancing pictures helped him develop a new approach to painting that would become the model for the French classical tradition. Shedding the sensuous, painterly manner of his early career, Poussin carved out the crisp, relief-like approach that characterized his mature work and set the precedent for three centuries of French art, from Le Brun and David to Cezanne and Picasso. He carried lessons learned from dance into every corner of his production. This book brings together a key group of paintings and drawings by Poussin, exploring the theme of dance and dancers in his production for the first time. Focusing on the dancing pictures created in Rome in the 1620s and 1630s, essays connect Poussin's interest in dance, his study of antiquities, and his formulation of a new classical style. Richly illustrated and engagingly written, this publication uses the prism of dance to cast Poussin in a new, fresh light.

In a long career that spanned the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, and the Bourbon Restoration, Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845) created innovative and daring paintings in the midst of the most turbulent times. Bringing together two dozen of Boilly's works-the majority of which have never before been published-this handsome volume includes portraiture, scenes of seduction, and groundbreaking representations of raucous Parisian street life. A master technician with acute powers of observation and a wry sense of humor, Boilly invented the term trompe l'oeil and popularized the genre through his stunningly realistic compositions. In this first English-language publication on Boilly in more than 20 years, Francesca Whitlum-Cooper vividly brings the artist and the period he lived in to life, shedding new light on Boilly's work and expanding our understanding of how art functioned within France's rapidly changing political environment.